Thought has its place, but the movie-making in my head can go to hell — where has it gotten me, after all? (I expect some tut-tutting here, but that’s all right.)
Yesterday I found myself slipping into a brief but terrible depression involving several related themes of beating up on myself. I wanted to never visit the Internet again. I wanted to break all my computers. I wanted to drive away my loving wife and have no money or prospects. I wanted to eat too much and never stop. I wanted to kill myself and fretted over the resulting pain and blood.
These occasional episodes almost always involve the triggering of various memories and accompanying conjectures that constitute “my story” in one way or another. There’s plenty there to chew on and get twisted over, but in this instance the button may have been the invitation to a retirement party honoring four ex-colleagues my wife received from the college she left back in ’99. I’m sure she’s revisited that period many times, just as I have. In my case, I was sitting here growing envious and confused, thinking of those four people with paid-off houses, huge retirement pensions (they didn’t quit early), and the like. Never mind the accompanying heart attacks, cancers, and emotional burdens. And of course, they’re still there… They didn’t wake up this morning breathing clean, pure air at 7,000 feet, and to experience new horizons, they’d have to spend a lot of that pension money to actually GO somewhere. All nonsense of course, because maybe they don’t want or need that kind of stimulus. There’s no way I could know and can’t possibly imagine, which just proves the irrationality of making these idiotic comparisons. But that’s what we humans do, and what I did, just last night. (Bleah.)
“My story” is of course utter bullshit, and so is yours: a constellation of memories, an invention of the mind and our emotions. What I’m beginning to glimpse is the possibility, just the merest flash, of not needing one.
After quickly descending into deepest doom, I remembered to watch my breathing. By that, I mean the sensation of air entering and leaving the nostrils. In just a few minutes, the self-hating grew quieter, and after a while, i realized I was all right (when my wife came home, I even had a smile on my face, sort of). The Big Deal is that I pulled out of the death-spiral not by wrestling with the control stick, but by putting my awareness someplace else. The hardest thing about meditation (the actual topic at hand) for me is the inner question that immediately arises: “Gee, it is really OKAY for me to do this?” What am I missing, in other words, by not actively cogitating on every goddamn thing in Creation?
Very little, apparently. And look what I gained. This is a revelation of the highest order. Like free Jesus, perfect sex, and gourmet food forever that only comes when ceasing to name, need, or desire it. The paradox is immaculate. [bows]
And now back to being fat, guilty, and addicted to bad news. Is this a great country, or what?!?
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
What are you doing with every entry in this journal of yours, my old friend, but telling your story? What do we humans have but our stories? Our pensions, our houses, our lack thereof – these are trivial compared to our stories. Most people aren’t very good at telling their stories. You’re gifted at it. Therefore it puzzles me that you rail against it – and against memory, which is all we have ever had since the days of Homer to show we’ve been alive. Self-flagellation isn’t much fun, admittedly, but pain is better than anesthesis in my book. And yours, too, I think, if you’d admit it. Pity and fear and pain are the three stooges that keep us laughing.
Nothing against memories in their place, and I love to tell stories. Hopefully I’ll get even better at it. But memories aren’t any more real than thoughts about the “future” are, and we tend to build the wrong collection of them anyway.
I can’t help it, I’ve always felt this way. I look at things and say to myself, this isn’t it! What we humans have is much greater than that, I think. So I’m exploring.
“Like free Jesus, perfect sex, and gourmet food forever that only comes when ceasing to name, need, or desire it. The paradox is immaculate.”
Nailed it.