Just Be And You Are

How appropriate…

February 21, 2010
All Life’s Pleasures

Your approach to life may be one of intense passion today. You may feel particularly sensual and thus driven to fully immerse yourself in the multitude of experiences life has to offer. This passionate temperament that has overtaken your soul can have a stimulating effect on your senses. Each nuance of every sensation you encounter—whether it is an image of indescribable beauty, a pleasing sound, a taste that makes your mouth sing, or a caress that sends waves of delight coursing through your soul—may be heightened. You can make the most of this intensified sensitivity by eating unfamiliar foods, trying new activities, surrounding yourself in beauty, and being openly sociable. If there is joy to be had today, you will likely have little trouble finding it.

When your passion for new and pleasurable experiences is your guide on your life’s journey, your awareness will become a finely tuned sensory instrument. You’ll imbibe the whole of every situation, setting, and interpersonal encounter in which you immerse yourself. Many of us move through life in a habitual manner, acknowledging only those elements of our existence that have a direct impact on our day-to-day lives. Your eagerness to broaden the boundaries of your everyday experience will motivate you to hone your senses so that you can avoid missing even a single joyful nuance of being alive. In time, your receptivity will ensure that you are aware of all life’s pleasures. The passion you feel today will sharpen your senses and help you appreciate all of the wondrous beauty in the world.

I was fortunate to actually feel this today. If only every day we were aware of the simple joys of life so strongly.

Music elevates me. I’m captive to it’s essence for no reason I can ever describe. I just know I’m lost to it. I believe in truth when I listen – a musical truth that’s undeniable. I move to it so it must be real. It stirs up something that makes me desperate to understand why. But I know it doesn’t matter. It’s not in the lyrics or the harmony or the composition. It’s me. Music just lets me be that.

As I sit here typing away on a computer in India, I think of all the alternate ways people are living right now. Just thinking of the endless traffic, I’m awestruck at the constant, continuous nature of everyday life all over the world.

As Robert Frost said, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”

Rather than getting me down, it gives me the freedom to know that the life I’m living is one of an endless number of possibilities. All I have to do to change it is change my context.

Fort Minor’s “Right Now” describes this all too well. So does one of my favorite movies of all time, Run Lola Run.

The quarter-life crisis and the mid-life crisis seem to result from two things; higher life expectancy and greater exposure to information on a global level.

We share more information faster

I’ll tackle the latter first. As in the case of psychological diagnoses, just by coining the term we’ve made a phenomenon out of it. What was meant to be a label defining a cohort’s struggle through hard times becomes a scapegoat for a variety of other problems. So no, I don’t think everyone really goes through it.

From what I’ve read, the DSM-IV vaguely defines the mid-life crisis as an adjustment disorder. Which makes me wonder about the standard by which adjustment is measured. What do we need adjusting to? Who defines that standard? And should we want to adjust? A word that better suits is “expectation”. Whether quarter or mid, we haven’t adjusted, or come to terms with what’s expected of us.

Misunderstandings, arguments, crises are usually 50/50. Never is one person completely at fault. There are two things at play here; a person’s ability to adjust and poor standards set for adjustment. If an increasing portion of the population is suffering from this crisis, maybe society needs to reexamine its expectations. But this doesn’t happen enough.

The person going through the crisis, initially outcasted and eventually adopted into the definition-driven community of struggling 20/40 somethings, is forced to sacrifice reconcile their expectations with those of society. This step is crucial – even character-defining – since the choice is buying in or not.

I know a lot of people who’ve gone through the quarter-life crisis, but I’m never clear about the outcome. I’m curious about people’s experience after the fact. I want to ask questions like “Did you settle and for what?”, “If you didn’t, what did you redefine in your life and how is different from society?”

We live longer so we know less younger

Life expectancy is the underlying theme. This is all new to us. Whereas society may be proliferating outdated standards, we as individuals may just not have a clue. We haven’t lived this long, ever. Everything changed post-industrial revolution and we’ve been making it up as we go along.

This is where I high-five the quarter-lifers and mid-lifers. Instead of being a diagnosis in the big book of mental disorders, this kind of a crisis builds new cultural memes, argues against status-quo through personal struggle, and acknowledges that change is necessary. It’s simply evolution taking it’s course. We used to be adults in our teens and now 30-year olds are going back home to live with their parents (who are alive and wealthy enough to support it).

Living through this crisis is all about uncertainty, which isn’t so bad on it’s own. What gets me riled up is the suffering that ensues from the uncertainty. That it’s a bad thing not to know even if we’re living longer and society hasn’t reevaluated it’s standards. That you drink through it, cheat through it, leave kids behind through it, spend excessively through it. That I’m not sure I understand. My guess is that transitions are harder to deal with than we expect, because we don’t talk about transitions enough.

It’s a set up

The keyword is “expectations”. That we need them at all. Outside of a cliched sense of “no expectation, moment-to-moment living”, there is a lot of truth in not setting yourself up for failure or letting someone else set you up in the first place. It’s unavoidable in the case of your parents, friends or the media. You need to know the definition in order to redefine it. Recognize though that it is not a bad experience, not a crisis. It just is.

Writing in a blog that doesn’t have much of a readership sometimes feels like beating your head against a wall. No matter what anyone says, it takes time to compose these posts and most of that time is mental; the energy you spend thinking about the kind of message you want to send streaming across the web. Each post is like an essay you would write for an English class, the difference being the whole class gets the chance to read it. You expose yourself in your writing and that’s what make the process so rewarding.

This is my fourth blog and in my hiatus between the last blog and this one I even wrote a treatise called, “The Case Against Blogging”, which I wanted to send to the uberblogger, Ben Casnocha. I chickened out. Not that I wasn’t ready for Ben’s counterargument, I wasn’t really that sure about my own. It mainly had to do with opportunity cost of time and spending that time wisely pursuing hobbies (which a blog can be one of) or starting businesses (which a blog can turn into) or just relaxing (again, something a blog can provide). I convinced myself out of my own treatise.

The greatest beneficiary of any blog is oneself. When you press the “Publish” button, it’s as if it’s final. Your word – a part of your inner thinking in that moment in time – is out there in the open, never to be reclaimed (though it technically can be, but again you’re the only one who has to answer to you). Seeing one’s stream of thought over time reveals an honesty that’s sometimes difficult to bear. “I thought that!”, you wonder, and move on because you think differently now because you thought that back then.

Just like a picture, a blog is a snapshot of your mental framework at a specific period in time. The bottomline is some people don’t like taking pictures, some don’t see the value in taking them, and a lot of others just couldn’t live without them. I’m in all those camps when it comes to blogging, and all I know right now is that I like taking pictures. And that works for me.

It’s not about losing yourself to busyness, it’s about awareness that lets you be a part of the world and treat others as equal.

We all do that in our own way. Intention is the key to life. When we take care of one, do we lose out on another? I don’t have that answer. So should we take care of others? I believe it comes naturally. A woman who trips over her heel and needs a hand to get up, the old man having trouble with his groceries, the little child who needs a boost to jump up on the chair, the colleague who needs extra eyes to proofread a report, the depressed who need an ear, the person seeking attention who needs a smile and nod from a stranger, the acknowledgment we all afford each other as human beings. These things happen as life happens. We can’t force ourselves to be healers and helpers, but we can be aware of our surroundings and notice the moments we can contribute.

We rarely know we’re happy when we are. It might be any of the circumstances above that makes us feel good or it could be a simple dinner conversation with a friend. We’ll cherish the moment later in our minds. In hindsight, we’ll see it as happy. Instead of seeking that happiness, maybe we need to flow more with the currents around us or create a current of our own. Just like in the ocean, we get pushed one way or another in the wave of life. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That can be a community working together. When we react negatively to those currents, we feel the need to create waves of our own. That’s up to you or your context.

Think about how a surfer catches waves. For every 30 minutes you wade around, you catch a 30 second break and fade into it. It’s a beautiful thing. Addictive beyond belief and hence the birth of surf culture. Those 30 minutes mean the world. As with life, you’re still floating on a moving current, but you’re not fighting it, you’re flowing along, feeling it out, timing the waves, getting to know the lay of the land (water). Then you see an opportunity and launch! You talk about the rush after the fact. If it weren’t for those 30 minutes, you’d never catch the break. The best surfers adapt the quickest, they develop a sixth sense for the waves, the current, and the flow.

Take your own 30 minutes. Or an hour. Or a year. Fighting against your surroundings will only push you back further and hurt those around you. Remember that just being isn’t just about doing whatever you want, it’s about knowing and respecting the moment you’re in, from one to the next. You can’t understand yourself – you can’t catch that break – unless you feel out the current life is taking you on.

It’s called “Twitching” and you get why at the end. I won’t repost the text directly because there’s something about reading it on the Gym Jones site. I don’t know how to think about it in any other state of mind than my own. You read and experience it in your own shoes. Suffice it to say, it will shake you, maybe make you grit your teeth and actually twitch in angst. Here are some quotes:

With each drag of the razor you ask yourself why you piss your blood into another man’s cup. Working at the job he offered, your future is between his thumb and forefinger. And the necessary accessories, the proclamations of success you thought gave you stability provide your boss security. Your debt encourages acquiescence, the heavy mortgage makes you polite.

On Monday you eat frozen food and live the homogenized city experience. But Sunday you thought about cutting your hair very short…

…Tuesday you look at the face in the mirror again. It stares back, accusing.

I love the next one. The experiencing – going through an emotion, an action, a passion, a charge – is the grit-making stuff that makes you who you are, not the experience itself. Life is the big experience. What you bring to it is up to you. Your self remembers what it felt like to go through that experience and the fact that you toughed it out in your own way is what others see. You just can’t hide it. Confidence isn’t complexity, it’s the simplicity of your layers stripped down to the core leaving you naked and true.

Don’t react to the itch with a scratch. Instead, learn it. Honor the necessity of both the itch and the scratch. But a haircut and a new soundtrack do not a modern man make. As long as you have a safety net you act without commitment. You’ll go back to your old habits once you meet a little resistance. You need the samurai’s desperateness and his insanity.

There’s a reflective technique around breathing that a lot of people do. They sit and be attentive to their breath to the point that the only thing they’re concentrating on is the purity of the inhalation and relief of the exhalation. What I prefer over this method is just five minutes here and there of pure personal freedom. Just to sit and do nothing. Not push or pressure yourself to think about any particular topic, not even the breath. Just be and listen, and touch, and look at whatever you want.

You might hear the the fridge humming, the birds chirping, the rhythm of the rain. You might feel yourself sitting, become aware of your posture, look at your hands like you’ve never seen them before. Your senses may become ablaze with everything that is around you. Or none of that may happen. You may just get lost in your thoughts or daydream or feel the desire to work, play, eat, or drink.

Whatever it will be, it will be yours. Your experience in that particular moment. Practice this two or three times a day and you’ll realize what you have, what’s always there to be noticed. Your attention is guided diverted by your daily routine, TV schedule, what mail may come your way, who might enter your office and all the other distractions that play a part. Seeing things for what they are, even for a few minutes, centers you to the reality – your perception of what is – that surrounds you. There is nothing like having that personal freedom of awareness that all humans alike can share.

There are times when you feel like doing absolutely nothing.  I’m talking about that lazy, I’ve-been-in-the-same-position-for-five-hours-straight-and-just-can’t-seem-to-get-up funk.  Where you start putting time limits on yourself, “OK, I’m gonna get up in 15 minutes, no excuses!”, but your limbs won’t answer your call. When it gets addictive not to move, you know you have to do something.

There are two  strains of thought around this:

1. Delve into the emotion.  Feel it out.  Live it.  Get through it.
2. Do something.  Anything!  In the end it will distract you.

Digging into the moment

While I tend to lean towards the latter, there’s a lot of merit to the first.  It doesn’t click immediately though.  It’s strange to say – live through it -when that’s exactly what you seem to be doing anyway.  Not exactly.  

The goal of this method is to get to the root of your malaise.  First, recognize fully where you are and what you’re doing.  Take the macro approach; close your eyes and picture the earth.  Now picture the country you’re in.  Then the state, the city, the building right down to where you’re sitting/lying/standing right now.  Stop! Open your eyes.  Now you’re in the moment.   » Read the rest of this entry «