Sunday, May 22, 2011

Vacation mit Parentzen

So I'm here in Germany on a vacation with my parents, which is a total throwback to days gone by on Cape Cod, chafing against the sand in my bathing suit, eating potato chips, and reading "just for fun" books.

My "just for fun" book for vacation is one of the Terry Pratchett Discworld books, dozens of which have been kicking around the house since I was as little as I recall - at least from my most early literate era (I brought The Brothers Karamazov with me, but I keep re-realizing that I am not much of a High Thinker, so I've put it down 20 pages in in favor of sci-fi-fantasy-humor). Terry Pratchett writes magical fantasy books with a comic twist, featuring lovable and fallible wizards-in-training, very well organized assassins' guilds, and, my personal favorite, death's apprentice named, of course, "Mort." So then, yes. I'm reading yet another of his delightful books, this time about sexism in the magical education system, and it's terrific, of course. And this got me to thinking about magic books and how much I liked them when I was little.

I liked magic books probably mostly because I hoped that my magical powers would be shortly revealed to me by a kindly witch/grandmother who'd been watching and waiting for the right moment to reveal me to myself, and then I would at last be ripped from my longing for specialness into a state of actual specialness. By ten or eleven I thought I had been doing a heroic amount of waiting and figured it was going to happen basically any day now. Oh how long it takes to shed dreams of our own significance.

I read other books, too, with other versions of magical children in them (no Harry Potter for me, though - I feel too old for those, somehow). There's always some version of using one's powers wisely, and that things go poorly for people who abuse their powers. Sort of along the lines of pointing a finger at someone means there's three pointing back at you blah blah blah. The full import of this magical approach to the golden rule didn't really gel for me until well into adulthood. I remember it coming up with road rage - I remember wishing I had the power to pop someone's tire from my car and inconvenience them, or that I could control their speedometer or otherwise use some magic to thwart them. I can't remember if I've blogged about this yet, but one day it occurred to me that if I really were a witch, and I popped someone's tires, then at least three of my tires would pop or some other equally inconvenient thing would happen right back to me, and I don't want that at all. But I would like to affect the meanness in the world . . . . So then, how to exact my revenge without incurring any negative effects? Why, a wise witch will use her power for good, yes? But if "punishing" the "evil" isn't clearly "good," then that changes things - maybe it's less for "good" (which requires a judgment call) and more "in a good way." So instead of wishing for people's tires to pop, I wish in my head that they feel more patient and less stressed out. That way it will hopefully come back to me times three that I feel patient and calm, and that would be very nice. This is a good game to play in all corners of life. It's hard to practice, though.

But anyway, I was reading this Pratchett book and it's about magic of course and one phrase in it was very nice: "Magic's easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There's nothing magical about it." Nice, yes? But I like this because I disagree (yoga stuff coming). In my Jivamukti book the authors say that it's much harder to put something together than take it apart - this makes sense to me - I could certainly unscrew a radio without thinking about it, but put it back together? Yeah, harder, right? And yoga is all about integrating and balancing oneself with oneself - that's the magic that yoga is getting at. It's taking things that are out of balance and pushing them into place. The study of it, the real academic part about it, is learning to identify imbalance, or to see where balance should be underneath all the veils and smoke and fog of life and of the mind. Because it's not easy to tell "what's wrong" and then make it right. Figuring out where things are imbalanced takes a lot of time, and it's easy to get sidetracked or obsessed with correcting one particular thing and then that ends up tipping the scales a different direction, and you need to be shaken sometimes to see that all your effort towards balance is taking you further away - it's a way of mistaking an attempt for balance with what is actually egotism and a desire for specialness.

So the good news that I'm getting from this is that I do have a chance to develop my magical powers, after all. And when I see imbalance at work in the world and how far away from center out efforts can take us, my fantasies about increasing my own specialness have been replaces by my gratitude for my ordinariness. Therefore, yoga is great, and sci-fi-fantasy-humor is great, and Germany is great. You can order beer bigger than your head anywhere you go, and drink it at 10 in the morning and nobody judges.

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