I haven’t written in a while. More precisely, I’ve been writing and re-writing the same thing for about a week – a micro treatise on how I get tripped up by Buddhism, relationships, and the awkward space between ambivalence and ambition; past, future, and present; action and inaction…. “the middle way.”
Last weekend, my daughter came to visit for a day. We had a good time catching up. We had deep conversations about life and work and relationships – in which I always state the obvious (don’t listen to me, I don’t know anything and don’t have the best track record). In a self-effacing type of way, I can sometimes take the anti-gratitude stance and jokingly (maybe) speak of life (particularly relationships) as a blues song: “Most Things Haven’t Worked Out.” With her, I usually try to remained detached yet caring. I try to encourage her to trust her gut, take risks, and not overthink things (except for when she should do the opposite). She’s smart and intuitive. Like most of us, I think she can recognize really bad and really good, and everything else is just varying degrees of in-between. With her, I can play the role of the wise whatever the male version of a spinster is. I’ll point out that she’ll find fault if she goes looking for it, and she’ll get out of her relationships what she brings into them (enter with joy and you can find joy, enter with torment and you can find torment). I don’t want her to get hurt, but I also don’t want her to be so guarded that she self-sabotages. I don’t think you can have a deeply connected relationship without the possibility of getting hurt or hurting someone else.
Those conversations are only part of the reason I’ve been re-working the same post for a week. Our talks made me reflective. Being reflective, in turn, sent me to a few lectures on Buddhism, happiness, and trying to live life without judgement – by which I mean without valuing any one thing, experience, memory, or person over anything else. This is hard for me (and most people). We make sense of the world through context and comparisons. More often than not, I tend to think of certain times in my life as more productive, or peaceful, or happier than others. I don’t know how useful that is and then I try to swing in the opposite direction – and view all stages as having no real value – they just are/were. Working through those contradictions (which can never be resolved) is hard and often fruitless work – or as Alan Watts (the philosopher I was listening to) says: “trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
And so, for the better part of a week, I’ve been trying to bite my own teeth. In these moods, everything seems connected and relevant. The songs I listen to take on a zen type of meaning: “Then as it was, then again it will be / And though the course may change sometimes / Rivers always reach the sea.” The poems I read remind me that it’s all part of the same soup called life – a father plays for his young son an old voicemail of his estranged father – and wonders why he holds on to such things. I begin to feel wise and dumb and quiet and full of noise. On more than one occasion I’ve felt like Rafiki or Yoda. Everything takes on importance and urgency in the same way that nothing is more important or urgent than anything else. Unfortunately, this can manifest in a type of paralysis – and well… a week of thinking with little to show for it, and being perfectly ok with that.