The hole I dig is bottomless but
nothing else can set me free...
Robert
Pollard, I Am a Scientist
It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Sprach Zarathustra
...a friend posted something on Facebook about how baffling
it is to see people...middle-class, educated...who should know better in this
day and age...eating at McDonalds...I told him I could relate...it’s the same
way I feel about cigarettes, and people who don’t exercise beyond the effort
required to walk to the car or find the remote....but that a lotta people I
know feel the same way when they see people eating pizza...(which my friend passionately loves)...(real
pizza...not that soy crap)...
Dairy and gluten and
grease, oh my!
Dorothy Gale,
The Yoga Teacher of Oz
...of course, thinking about it much at all makes me realize how little
room I have to judge...(to paraphrase Bob Dylan, if the full extent of my
unmindful consumption could be seen, the granola crowd’d probably put my head
in some kinda earnest, self-righteous, painfully passive-aggressive equivalent
of a guillotine)...especially since, with a PhD and a decade or so in the
crunchy, life-affirming yoga world, I know, like, waaaay better...
If I don’t know I don’t know
....................................I
think I know
If I don’t know I know
I
think I don’t know
R.D.
Laing, Knots
...really, I said, what I think it comes down to is that life is hard....(realizing, in
retrospect that I might’ve been unconsciously plagiarizing something Kurt
Vonnegut wrote about why we keep destroying our environment even though we know
better)...(or maybe it was somebody else, and I’m still unconsciously
plagiarizing)...(and so the list of my sins of consciousness or the lack
thereof continues to grow)...
...I mean...I’m more than aware that a handful of raw
organic kale grown in the backyard garden I’m too lazy to cultivate, in an extremely
rural region where with a minimal quantity of carcinogens and other toxins in
the rain and groundwater, would be a far better choice on just about every
truly conscious kinda level than a cupcake or a beer...and yet, I’m probably
gonna both eat the cupcake and drink the beer, anyway, for the sheer momentary
pleasure of it...(though I will put a handful of
store-bought-and-probably-not-organic-‘cause-that-shit’s-too-expensive kale in
my daily smoothie)....just like I won’t spend nearly as much time meditating as I do getting into idiotic
arguments with relative strangers on-line...
...with so many
sinkin’ now you gotta keep thinkin’ you can make it through these waves:
acid booze and ass,
needles guns and grass, lotsa laughs...
Joni Mitchell
...and that’s because, deep down, to be painfully honest, no
matter how many positive Buddhist quotes I might like to recite while people are holding poses for five minutes at a time in Yin class about the
wonder and sheer illimitable awesomeness of the present moment, it doesn’t seem
worth it...with so much despair lurking in the recesses of mind and body, those
little things that help us through through the minutes of the day, things we love, even if they
don’t benefit us in the long run, can't be so easily forsaken...
...Thoreau wrote that most of us live
lives of quiet desperation...(and Pink Floyd, somehow, a hundred
years later, appropriated that and called it the
English way)....Freud’s death instinct...mean, grumpy old
thanatos...often powerful as the life
instinct, more upbeat and personable
eros...sometimes
more...no matter how many ridiculous positive affirmations we in the yoga crowd
try to force-feed ourselves when we’re not trying to blame it all on being
modern and
western and thus trying to shed our modern western skins...(without
realizing, of course, that there’s really nothing more modern or western than
the romanticism that causes us to think that becoming ancient and the far away
other will cure us of our despair)...(and
now, it seems, I’m pointing the finger of self-righteous judgment in the
opposite direction)....(I’ll stop)...(but not quite yet)...
...(here, without further ado, is my own painfully pissed off
and horribly self-righteous Facebook post from a week ago, following the news
of Robin Williams, dead of chronic despair:
If
there's one aspect of the yoga world that I absolutely loathe, it's how many
people there are—including teachers, yoga bloggers with tens of thousands of
"likes," and major revered gurus--who seem to think they're experts
on depression even though they clearly know absolutely nothing about it—thinking
it's synonymous with being bummed out and can be fixed with positive
affirmations or an "attitude adjustment" (clearly unaware that
depression might be defined as the inability to take on a positive attitude),
or that it's synonymous with sadness, and thus, is something we all experience
from time to time and should be seen as a natural and beautiful part of life.
No, it isn't. And if you don't know that, you should keep your mouth shut on
the subject, no matter how many people fawn on you and tell you how wise and
spiritual you are.....harsh, but, if nothing else, it’s my own blood in
which I’m writing)...
....ultimately, I think it all points to the incredible necessity for
compassion...for all of us...in all of our junk-food eating, time-wasting,
un-compassionate, judgmental, self-righteous, sometimes flat-out nasty glory....because of all that, in fact...because
we have pain and because we all do what we do, however unmindful,
however counterproductive, to make ourselves feel better...right here, right
now...
