This weekend I had to work for a few hours at a big, popular, flower event that the city has every year, usually the same weekend as Mother’s Day. It’s right near the law school I went to, and I realized that professors and people I know from that time might swing through and see me, and I’d end up having some conversations about what I’m doing with myself these days etc. And that’s fine, I’m completely happy with my life choices and don’t feel accountable to anyone for any of my decisions anyway (I’m a grown-up, yes? Yes.). But it did get me thinking about what I usually say about what I'm doing and why, and it made me think about "where" I like to put myself in the stream of human experience. I have concluded that I prefer to be more on the inoculation side of things and less on the antibiotics end of things.
So I think I’ve mentioned before the pro bono thing, providing free legal services to people who can’t afford them. And that I hated it and found it ridiculously stressful and horrible. And yet, the tug at myself to “help” people and use my supposed powers for good created a lot of conflict in me. It’s like forcing yourself to eat something really bitter because it’s good for you. There are really other ways to keep yourself positively occupied or full of nutrients than by doing things that you hate.
Anyway. When providing legal services to anyone, you’re usually on the We’re F***ed end of an event. There’s certainly very little opportunity for working in a preventive roll for an attorney unless you have an ongoing relationship with a client who consults you as they move through their personal decisions. Nope, for most people, calling a lawyer is like getting antibiotics - you're f*****, but we can through some expert-seeming crap on it, and you'll be fine. And I think I prefer working on the inoculation end of life, in that it involves the point in time before everything goes to hell, when everyone can do some yoga and go for a walk and eat some vegetables. That’s what I can handle; that’s what I like.
I used to feel really mystified by people who spent their lives seemingly dedicated to “how” one lives their life. Seemed really boring to me. Diet gurus, exercise lifestyle people, whatever – it seemed like such a limited life to consume oneself with these kinds of things and want to talk to people about how to act all day. Weird. I think it seemed to me that we all sort of figure out how to act anyway, and we should be aiming for higher things like art and music or whatever; that our personal potential is primary, and that the tiny facts of sustenance and connectedness and fitness and peace were secondary pursuits that should be balanced in accordance to their ability to support or detract from one’s primary purpose. But I feel a little more interested in versions of life that have a lot to do with how to live life, as opposed to leaving that as an afterthought or as the natural consequence of one’s other choices/primary pursuits. It’s endlessly fascinating, this examination-breakdown of our tiny choices, and the measuring of our feelings and reactions against these choices, and the adjusting of ourselves depending on the impact we sense. Finding satisfaction in this requires some letting go, perhaps. You might have to let go of ideas of importance or fame or success or whatever else you might think is “more important” than the tiny decisions that come up every day about how to live. Really it all kind of felt small to me, but now I’m starting to feel like it’s everything. Nowadays we have a lot of forces pressing on us that do make small (mostly consumption-based) decisions really big – oil consumption, free range animals, whatever, but even without all the social/ethical baggage that we assign to our decisions, attentiveness to the mundane is pretty much where it’s at. There is a dark side to this attentiveness, which is that stuff like going to a coffee shop can become an event of emotional impact completely disproportionate to its import, i.e., “did the barista hate me with that snarling snarkiness,” “this table is too sticky,” “those people are talking too loud,” “is someone looking at my laptop information,” “I have to pee but I don’t want to leave my stuff here but I also don’t want to lose my seat.”
The roller-coaster of our everyday experience can be pretty intense if you absorb yourself too fully in its minutiae. Maybe I’m trying to say something else about being happy just trying to live. That the range of interactions and emotions we have going to a coffee shop are the higher purpose in life? Something like that?
BUT ANYWAY. Suffice it to say that I empathize with people who are a bit obsessed with the hard work of making their daily decisions have a positive impact on themselves, because it doesn’t seem small-minded or less lofty to me, it seems real and powerful. And I am much happier trying to part of the prospective, as opposed to responsive, aspect of sentient happiness here on the planet, which is to say that I prefer inoculations (or the lifestyle equivalent) to antibiotics. Prevention is way less toxic a game than cure, and I am okay with a life that has less to do with accomplishing “important” things and more to do with living well.
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