Snow. Also, Moderation Schmoderation

Hi, it's snowing. I am not super pumped about that. The nice weather was so very nice. I am pretty ready for warmth.

So here's some thoughts about moderation. I have been pretty much not drinking for a few months now, and it's definitely been a big life changer etc. I don't want to be obsessive about the not drinking, so I don't really have an official policy like Never Again, but it wasn't out of the question, of course. So anyway in accord with my Sure Maybe policy on drinking, I had half a dark beer on Saturday night. Just half - I left the other half on the table all alone with itself as we paid the check. I only wanted half, and that was fine.

So this is great in a few ways. One, declining to consume something even though it is right in front of me isn't really my strongest quality, and the ability to do this on Saturday to me means that yoga is awesome. Being all yoga-sensitive to how I feel can be overwhelming sometimes, but it's ultimately the greatest thing ever. Two, feeling good about this also made me rethink how I view moderation, and I'm pretty happy about it.

What is moderation? We usually treat it as vaguely the mid-point between zero and whatever we view socially/culturally as extreme. For example, if you drink beer, you might think that zero beers is abstaining, and that six beers is extreme. We all understand six beers to be pretty drunk and zero beers to be not drunk. Two to three beers is moderate. We can play this game with t.v. watching, too. Or how much you drive your car, or how much garbage you make. Living somewhere below the boundaries of mid-behavior and no behavior is moderate.

So I think the problems with this are manifold. First of all, just because some behavior or habit exists doesn't mean that you have to adopt a moderate relationship with it. Normalcy and happiness are not contingent upon one's adoption of any one particular social behavior, and declining to participate in something doesn't have to mean that you are "abstaining" from it. Just to be extreme about it here, I do not consider myself to be abstaining from smoking crack. I have no relationship with it because I just don't want to (also I wouldn't know how to get crack, but I bet it's pretty easy). But the more common a behavior becomes the more pressure there is to develop some kind of relationship to it, and then the labels on our behaviors starts to sneak in. This is how we started calling people "non-smokers" back in the day. What?! Seems sort of silly, right?

Second, there is a problem with the measure of extremity. Take garbage, for instance. It's bad to make garbage. Plastic bags live forever and kill dolphins and manatees and it's bad to put them in landfills and we all know it. Oh but wait, since most people throw away a bajillion plastic bags, if I throw away three a week it's not a big deal, right? The relativism of what determines moderation is freaking stupid. One to two drinks per week. An hour of television. Exercise three days a week. These don't really have much to do with how an individual is impacted by any one behavior, and that leads me to the next thing.

We have a lot of guidelines, official-type doctor's-office guidelines, for what are acceptable, moderate, behaviors. Eight hours of sleep. Potato chips once a week. Brush your teeth twice or three times a day. Food pyramid. You know why we have all these guidelines for behavior? Because no one knows how they actually feel. We can't tell. We are so out of touch with our bodies that we can't even tell that industrialized meat is nasty, or that t.v. is making us depressed, or whatever. It's completely weird that people need to be told what is good for them. And then if they subscribe to these notions of appropriate behavior, we get a class of rules-followers who then get to judge people for their choices. "Did you know red wine antioxidants are less powerful than raw grape skins? Agave nectar extraction is soooo bad for the environment! Too much sunshine deteriorates your cell walls! Too little sunshine imbalances your vitamin D!" We have all these things because we don't know how we feel, which means we have no idea what feels good and right.

Which then leads me to my ultimate point: yoga is awesome. Paying close attention to how I feel is really valuable for cutting through all the social crap of appropriate, moderate, officially sanctioned behavior, which I view as being complete crapola. Take my new job, for instance. I make literally one SEVENTH of the money I used to make at my "good" job, but now, I move around all day, I don't take my work home, and the expectations are reasonable. My actual experience as a human being is 100% percent better doing something "lesser" than before.

In conclusion, everything you are told is crap. Do not pay attention to it.