Another week has passed and I’m still waltzing around the edges of life’s ever-expanding dance floor. The dance partners change frequently: wonder for one turn, disappointment for another, curiosity, skepticism, worry, and reverie. All the while, the tune in the background is a series of questions – most of them variations on that eternal theme – how to live a life. The simplest answer is a self-evident one. One lives life by being alive. Beyond that simplicity (performing the functions of a living being) is a river swirling with nuance whose sandy bottom shifts and is often beyond reach. We’re all trying to gain some type of footing.
My attempts to write, aside from a few observations and some draft poems, have been stymied by the sinewy connectedness of everything. I can’t write about the environmental dangers of artificial intelligence without acknowledging my own fears around AI and my desire to be a conscientious objector to this forced upon us technology. I can’t write about my desire to be conscientious objector without drifting into my feelings about work and capitalism. I can’t address my feelings about work and capitalism without trying to answer the question: how should one live a purposeful, and dare I say ethical, life. Despite my inner-Buddhist “knowing better,” I’ve been trying to ascertain purpose, I’ve been trying to ascribe meaning. It’s an old habit that’s hard to break.
Deep thinking like this makes me wonder if anyone else is on this dance floor. This dance tuckers me out. And when I’ve tired of it, I walk away. I leave a blog post in the increasingly cluttered draft folder and go to the beach or the bar or scroll social media or look but don’t engage on the dating apps. Eventually, the sun sets, the bar closes, I shut my eyes, and wake to try again – with or without purpose… mostly because I can.
To be clear, I don’t attempt to write about these things (how to live a life) because I believe that I have something unique to say. Many many smarter, more thoughtful, erudite, and better read people have walked this path before. Their contributions to philosophy and spirituality and ethics have been profound and widely influential. And yet, their thinking can be, at best, a suggestion that will require a significant amount of jiggering and shimming into place. Only I can figure out how this dance is supposed to go, its starts and stops, its dips and glides, its tempo changes. Only I can map out how big my dance floor is. Only I can test its edges or retreat back to some safe space in the crowded middle or observing while leaning up against a wall.