TWO ATTITUDES IN LIFE
A LIFE OF ABUNDANCE, GRATITUDE, JOY, AND GIVING
OR
A LIFE OF SCARCITY, GREED, CONSUMPTION, AND FEAR GREED AND CONSUMPTION
‘It’s true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism , has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism; where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society where the whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to their need for consumption.’ Thomas Merton
‘It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.’ David Foster Wallace
Our culture encourages us to get ahead at any cost and grab what we can while we can without any concern for fundamental values. And yet we consume, we use our credit cards, our house mortgages to consume. Seriously, we don’t know that we want something until someone makes it, shows it to us, and then convinces us that we need it. And once something is out there on the market, there is no better determinant than who will buy it, than algorithms. A computer is much better than a human at triggering Pavlov’s dog syndrome; far exceeding the wildest dreams of ad executives and marketing departments. In fact, the whole economic model is not to find out what people need and/or want, but to create something totally new and then convince them that they have to have it.
Not only are we told what we need to have in terms of material goods, but also what our belief systems are: who we need to fear, to hate, which political party to support, and which God we need to believe in..
On December 4th, 2009, Google’s corporate blog announced with no fanfare and more or less hidden in other text: “Personalized search for everyone.” And the game changed.
‘A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.’ Mark Zuckerberg
We assume search engines are unbiased. But if you google “proof of climate change” and you’re an east-coast liberal, you’ll get an entirely different set of facts than a Texan republican. Chris Palmer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, “You’re given a free service and the cost is information about you. And Google and Facebook translate that directly into money. On Gmail we pour the most intimate details of our lives.”
As a business strategy, the Internet giants formula is simple. The more personally relevant their info offerings are, the more ads they can sell, and the more likely you are to buy products advertisers are offering. Amazon sells billions of dollars in merchandise by predicting what each customer is interested in and by putting it in front of the virtual store.
However, the ‘filter bubble’ phenomena does much more than simply sell you on material goods as politically motivated special interest groups pay Facebook and other Internet Giants to spread ‘fake news’ and propaganda to influence the way people think and ultimately vote. Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we are more and more insulated; enclosed in our own egocentric filter bubbles. Healthy democracy needs reliance on shared facts (remember those!); instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.’ Eli Pariser
It is difficult to navigate the world when there are no shared ‘facts’, when actually your personal devices are only feeding what you already have a tendency to believe. A logarithm is very efficient at determining your belief system, and then giving you your daily dose of ‘confirmation bias’. I know people who have been taken so far down the rabbit hole of the most absurd conspiracy theory and misinformation websites, that it would require the services of an exorcist, a hypnotist and a bevy of Swiss psychiatrists to bring them back to reality.
It appears that when we come from an attitude of scarcity instead of one of gratitude for what we already have; an attitude of abundance: our capitalistic society, which now is the global economic model, teaches that we are always lacking and therefore need more, more, more. And we, as consumers, consume our hearts away-’sick with desire’, to quote Yeats. All the while we, in prosperous nations, continue to consume and discard, while abject poverty, disease and starvation exist in other parts of the world. And it is abundantly clear that while we allowed any semblance of consensus, any ‘shared facts’ to die, our values were discarded as well.
“In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC, or Allah; be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some set of inviolable set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they grieve you. Worship power, and you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. On one level, we know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.” David Foster Wallace
Susan Jeffers writes that most of us have never really fully developed into adults, though on the surface we act like adults, and that this is a key component to the fear that permeates most of our lives, and prevents us from growing as human beings. ‘We dress ourselves, we feed ourselves; we earn a living. Yet, there seems to be a part of us that never progresses much beyond the crib. Metaphorically, we remain frightened that no one will come to relieve our hunger- for food, money, love, praise, and so on. Any relief in the way of ‘food’ is only temporary; we know that hunger will come again.’
‘Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: a scraped knee, spilled milk, a broken toy. As adults, we know that kids have no idea as to what constitutes a genuine problem because what constitutes a genuine problem because inexperience greatly limits their perspective. Children do not yet know that the world does not revolve around them.
As grownups, dare we admit that to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not! Yet evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national and cultural conflicts and you will find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.
Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective our problems would shrink, or never appear at all- and we would celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behaviors of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.’ Neil DeGrasse Tyson
I used to live in a room full of mirrors
Where all I could see was me,
But i took my spirit and smashed those mirrors
And now there’s a whole world for me to see.
James Marshall (Jimi) Hendrix
SCARCITY
Imagine what this dilemma sets up for us in the area of our daily living. We can’t give. We can’t love. We become, consciously or unconsciously, manipulative, because our very survival is involved. And how do we feel operating like this? Helpless, trapped, angry, frustrated, dissatisfied, unfulfilled, and, most of all, fearful. People who fear can’t genuinely give. They are imbued with a deep-seated sense of scarcity in the world, as if there wasn’t enough to go around. Not enough love, not enough money, not enough praise, not enough attention-simply not enough. Usually fear in one area of our lives generalizes, and we become closed down and protective in many areas of our lives. Fearful people can be visualized as crouched and hugging themselves. Whereas this image represents the inner state of all frightened people, the outer manifestation can take many forms.
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: It is my belief that much of the self-help industry is doing more harm than good inasmuch as that by constantly seeking happiness in your life, it can actually make you continually focus on what you lack and happiness becomes an end unto itself, making happiness elusive and always out of reach.
‘Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness. If you ask ‘what ought to be done’ and ‘what ought not to be done’ on earth to create happiness, I answer that these questions do not have an answer. There is no way of determining such things. Yet, at the same time, if I cease striving for happiness, the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ at once become apparent all by themselves. Contentment and well-being at once become possible the moment you cease to act with them in view, you will have both happiness and well-being.’ Chuang Tzu
‘Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne
MINDFULNESS OF CONSUMPTION
‘In order to forget that we have pain: sorrow, fear, despair, loneliness, etc., we lose ourselves in the practice of consumption. We binge-watch Netflix series, we eat a lot of fat and sugar, drink, take drugs. Anything to bury our wounds and deal with the reality of our situation. We suppress these feelings by consuming. So we distract ourselves in a myriad of ways- we do everything we can to avoid confronting our true selves. This kind of consumption is running away and the items we consume continue to bring the toxins of violence, fear, and anger inside of us.’ Thich Nhat Hanh
SCAR-CITY: :)
‘Society tells us we never have enough. We aren’t good enough. We aren’t safe enough. We are not enough. We are not certain enough. We aren’t perfect enough. We are not extraordinary enough. An ordinary life has become synonymous with a meaningless life. So we are on a quest for the extraordinary. We chase after extraordinary experiences, extraordinary states of being (I want to become enlightened!) and we purchase material goods that we don’t need, not realizing that it is in our ordinary lives that meaning, joy and beauty are to be found.’ Brene Brown
I just noticed at this very moment that if you hyphenate SCARCITY - you get SCAR-CITY. How appropriate! I would imagine that many of us bear the scars of always wanting more, always needing more because we are afraid of life. Fortunately, there is another way we can choose to live. One of abundance and gratitude, of values that we can hold near and dear to our hearts and the abundant, fearless, life we can create for ourselves and others by giving, by choosing to work towards something bigger than ourselves, that gives our lives meaning and joy.
A LIFE OF ABUNDANCE, GRATITUDE, JOY, AND GIVING
First and foremost we can choose to open our lives to the attitude of abundance, which entails being grateful for what we have!
The promise of a spiritual life is that we can heal these feelings through love and an experiential understanding of the essential interconnectedness of all beings. When our relationships are superficial, we feel as though we are living superficial lives. However, when our relationships with others and ourselves, reflect our deeper commitments and aspirations, we feel as if we are traveling on the right path. Study after study has shown that having commitments is actually healthy, especially if those commitments reflect the values that we have chosen to care about.
‘The key is to keep company only with people that uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.’ Epictetus
Of course, love comes through relating. ‘No man is an island unto himself’. That is why we must connect and overcome our feelings of inadequacies and shame and allow our true selves to be seen by others. We allow ourselves to be vulnerable- which is often mistaken for weakness, when, in fact, it is the opposite. Relationships are essential for spiritual growth and help us find meaning and purpose in our lives. Spiritual growth means an aspiration and an intention to improve the quality of our own lives as well as the lives of others. We who live on this planet Earth share a common ancestry and a common destiny. We already live together; we need to learn to not only live together, but to work together for our common good and the good of our Home: Planet Earth. We need to learn to love others-even those who our culture tells us are at fault and therefore who we must fear and hate.
Studies have shown that joy is the most difficult emotion for people to experience and cultivate. What does that tell us?
“Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.” Andre Gide
It is up to us how we choose to live our lives and how to perceive and react with the external world and others. For me, it’s all about compassion and kindness and joy and gratitude. They are all connected. It’s about learning to see and appreciate the beauty in life and to be grateful and filled with the joy of being alive. I know that, at times, I don’t feel any of the above, but I am learning to do so, moment by moment. I do know that you can’t appreciate anything in life unless you are awake, and that without gratitude for the gift of life, there is no joy in being alive. Mindfulness equals gratitude. Gratitude equals joy! It is impossible to be grateful for something if you are not aware of it- aware of the experience of being alive! It is likewise impossible to be grateful for something and not experience joy! They are all interconnected.
“Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within us and without us.” David Whyte
“When you rise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive: to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love. Each day brings its own gifts.” Marcus Aurelius
Gratitude is an appreciation of all that sustains us; an acknowledgement of blessings great and small. It is confidence in life itself and confidence in ourselves and our ability to manage our own lives. The same force that causes all things to grow on this planet are within us. We exist because every single one of our ancestors from the beginning of the first man was a survivor and cared and nurtured their young and passed down to us valuable knowledge that would sustain us in life. Gratitude doesn’t envy others or compare. It is saying that we have enough. It receives in wonder the myriad blessings of rain and sunlight, the care that supports every life. It’s why I think everyone should garden. Gardening has so much to teach us: patience, gratitude, and faith: faith that the little seed you planted will one day produce life-sustaining food or beautiful blossoms to nourish the soul.
Native American elders begin each ceremony with grateful prayers to Mother Earth and Father Sky, to the four directions, to the animal, plant, and mineral brothers and sisters who share the earth and support life.
“When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the morning light, for your life and strength. Give thanks for your food and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, then the fault lies in yourself.” Chief Tecumseh
THE JOY OF BEING
As gratitude grows, it gives rise to joy. We can rejoice in our own good fortune and in the good fortune of others. In joy, we are not afraid of pleasure. It is not being disloyal to the suffering of the world to honor the happiness we’ve been given. Joy gladdens the heart and makes us feel alive. We can be joyful for people we love, for moments of goodness, for sunshine and trees, and for the very breath in our lungs.
As children, we have this innate ability to rejoice in life itself; in the very fact that we are alive. As children, we jump out of bed to greet the day. Unfortunately, by adolescence, this joy of being alive is drummed and drilled out of us.
‘If the only prayer you ever say in your life is thank-you- that will be enough’ Meister Eckhart
And that is just the point - how the world, moist and beautiful, calls each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning: ‘Here you are alive! Would you like to make a comment?’ Mary Oliver
The world we live in is a temple, and the miraculous light of the first stars is shining through it all the time. In place of original sin, we can celebrate our own basic goodness. We are the beauty we have been seeking all our lives.
I am larger than I thought
I did not know that I held so much goodness
Walt Whitman
Hello sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields. Watch now how I start the day in happiness, in kindness. Mary Oliver
Our perceptions are so crucial. Do we count our blessings or our shortcomings, our failures? The art of gratitude is being able to make ordinary things in your life extraordinary. Most of us have been trained to see only the ‘scarcity’. We live in a moan and groan society. Just listen to the amount of complaining that goes on within you and around you. And it’s up to us to train ourselves to stop complaining and look at all the beauty and goodness that surrounds us everyday, despite what is happening around us. When we do that, life is not about the frightening feeling of ‘not-enough’ or scarcity - but the fear-less feeling of abundance!
Be content with what you have. Rejoice in the way things are. When you realize nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you. He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough. Lao Tzu
Einstein, who saw more deeply than others into the nature of space and time, matter and energy, also Albert Einstein saw into the blinding effects of clinging and attachment and how important it is to dissolve what he called the ‘delusion of separateness’. Responding to a rabbi who had written to him for advice on how to explain the death of his sixteen year old daughter to her grieving elder sister, Einstein replied:
‘A human being is part of the whole, called by us the Universe; a part limited by time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affections for a few persons closest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is part of liberation and the foundation of inner security.’ Albert Einstein
YOUR MIND IS THE GARDEN
Before we can sow seeds of compassion, we must take care to choose fertile ground on which to sow. That means that we must act with an open heart and the right intention. Our mind is like a field, and performing actions is like sowing seeds in that field. Virtuous actions sow seeds of future happiness and non-virtuous actions sow seeds of future suffering. These seeds remain dormant in our mind until the conditions for them to ripen occur, and then they produce their harvest. We all have a lot of garbage in our lives. We can use that garbage as compost. We all suffer, but we must not allow our suffering to prevent us from seeing all the miracles of life. If one tree in our garden is sick, we must tend to it carefully, but don’t ignore the rest of your garden. A well-tended garden will bear life-sustaining fruits and vegetables along with beautiful blossoms that soothe the soul. Although flowers are impermanent, like us, it makes them all the more precious.
Buddhists have reverence for all life and this is called ‘virtue’. Our life on this planet is short and goes by in the blink of an eye, but the smallest act of kindness can change the world and if we cultivate integrity and kindness, we pass that on to others, to the next generation. We can literally become a vessel for virtue. Like a pitcher of fresh water we can pass it on to others so they can drink from the well of kindness and water their garden.
In Buddhism, ethical questions are not framed in terms of good and bad, but on suffering and its causes. Stealing is harmful to us and the wider community. Buddhist training does not view the world through the lens of ‘shame’, of the concept of ‘sin’ or speak of a God who sets moral rules and punishes wrongdoers. Instead it describes the natural laws of karma (cause and effect), interconnectedness, and who we really are!
Buddhist traditions teach that we are born with an innate basic goodness and inner nobility. There is no denying that all of our actions, words, and thoughts have direct consequences. Often we judge people by their situation, appearance, and yes, wrongdoing. But Buddhists don’t regard those who do harm as ‘sinners’ or intrinsically ‘evil’ but act from ignorance, and their own suffering. We don’t know what suffering has caused the other person to act this way. Allow me to present a scenario for you.
You are at a busy market on a hot afternoon carefully selecting the freshest fruits and vegetables and after your purchase you head home with all your groceries stuffed in a large paper bag. Just as you approach a corner at an intersection, somebody bumps into you, causing you to fall and your groceries are strewn all over the sidewalk and crosswalk. Enraged, you jump to your feet ready to give someone hell. But, just behind you still lying on the sidewalk is a man with dark glasses and a white cane. He is blind. How quickly you change from raging anger to genuine concern for the welfare of this poor man. The spilled groceries no longer matter.
Buddhism teaches that wrongdoing emanates from ignorance, delusion, cravings and that people are not inherently evil. In this case the culprit was literally blind!
‘When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.’ Helen Keller
Praise and blame, obstacles and triumph will come and go. It is not given to us to know how our life will affect the world. What is given to us is to tend the intentions of the heart and plant beautiful seeds with our deeds. Do not doubt that your good actions will bear fruit, and that change for the better can arise from your life.
‘Do not depend on the hope of results but concentrate on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.’ Thomas Merton
When our efforts seem futile, we can trust that in another time and place there may be unexpected results. When we are trying to address a problem, improve the state of the world, help a friend, comfort a grieving child, it may seem to be going nowhere. Yet our actions are like planting seeds in the ground. We don’t know for sure when they will bear fruit, and what seems like failure may be a time of gestation. Our work toward the good can be sustained if we don’t measure the success or failure of our actions by the immediate and superficial results. I think that is why I love gardening so much. It is so good for the soul and it teaches us patience. When I am working in a garden, I am totally in the here and now- without trying to be.
‘It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks; to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.’ Helen Keller
GIVING
You may say to yourself, ‘I have nothing to give.’ yes you do, yes we do! Give Away Information, Give Away Love, Give Away your time. Volunteer in your community. We can all make a difference. You count. You matter. If you do not feel that way now, you will once you go out into the world and do a kind deed for someone.
‘Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my wealth, my power, and my strength. This experience of heightened vitality and potency wills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence, as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my joy and gratitude of being alive.’ Erich Fromm
GIVE AWAY SMILES
It takes very little for us to smile. Sometimes I will be in the grocery store or mall and see people with grim, hostile faces. It is so sad. So I smile everywhere I go and I smile when I meditate. I smile if I am in pain, if I am suffering and eventually the smile brings me back to the present moment. Basically we suffer the most in the past and in the future.
Yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow only a vision -
But today - well lived in the
Present moment,
Makes all our yesterdays
Full of beautiful memories
And all our tomorrows
Visions of hope.
CM
Giving is flowing outward toward genuine connection and is the greatest antidote to fear. It is about letting go of your crouched, withholding self and standing tall with outstretched arms. It is about feeling a sense of abundance. Like any other skill, however, it takes practice. Giving from the position of ‘I count’, enhances this ability.
Kind hearts are the garden
Kind thoughts are the roots
Kind words are the blossoms
Kind deeds are the fruits
John Ruskin
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as being a worthy one, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making us happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and, as long as I live, it is my privilege to do whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it to the next generation.” George Bernard Shaw
THE STARFISH
There is a story of a man who was walking along a beach in a well-known tourist destination, and there were literally thousands and thousands of stranded starfish that had been swept in by the tide and soon to die. He noticed a man in the distance who was throwing them back into the water, one at a time. As he approached the man he exclaimed, ‘But there are so many. You can’t possibly make a difference.’ The man simply threw another out and said, ‘Made a difference to that one.’
‘Our task is to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The striving for such achievement is part of liberation of inner security.’ Einstein
I was searching for an antidote to ‘Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national and cultural conflicts and you will find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.’ Neal DeGrasse Tyson
For I can leave no stone unturned in my posts (much to the chagrin of the reader), so I was going to pull out the heavies: the Buddha, Lao Tzu, but all I needed was Einstein.
You can make a difference. Be the change you want to see in the world. Listen to your heart, but make sure you stroke your heart once in a while. You are as worthy and deserving of love as anyone. Remember we are all interconnected to each other and to nature in all its beauty and when all is said and done amongst the fray, the angst, the rage, the noise, all we have left is Kindness. That’s it! Take care of one another, Colin.
THE ZEN OF SEEING
“Zen teaches nothing. It merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach; it points. The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect. Thought creates things by slicing up reality into little bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are ‘think-ing’ you are ‘thing-ing’. (as opposed to just ‘being’.) Thought does not report things; it distorts reality to create things, and as Bergson noted, ‘In so doing, it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape.’ Thus, to the extent that we actually imagine a world of discrete and separate things, conceptions become perceptions, and we have in this manner, populated our universe with nothing but ghosts.” Zen Scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss and start looking for answers.” French philosopher of phenomenology Henri Bergson
“We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, computer screens. Our’ looking’ is perfected every day- but we see less and less. Never has it been more urgent to speak of seeing, for we are onlookers, spectators, ‘subjects’ that look at ‘objects’ Quickly, we stick labels on all that is, labels that stick once and for all. By these labels, we recognize everything, but no longer see anything.” Frederick Franz
‘A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet ‘for sale’, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who hasn’t acquired full the ‘having’ mode of existence- briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing- cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, and isolated in present day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his ‘normal contemporaries. Not rarely, he will suffer from anxiety and depression that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society.’
There is much debate about whether or not we have free will. If we don’t have free will it denies the sanctity of life on this planet we call home. I readily acknowledge that we have very little control over the physical world, despite what the self-help success/ spirituality snake oil salesmen and gurus tell us. However, what we do get to choose is what we ultimately care about. So we need to choose our values; what we truly care about carefully, and to constantly re-evaluate those values and our relationships in order to continue to grow. These days it is a struggle, it seems, to merely be a decent, authentic human being. People are crying out for meaning in their lives and in their relationships.
“In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship- be it JC, or Allah; be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some set of inviolable set of ethical principles- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they grieve you. Worship power, and you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. On one level, we know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.” David Foster Wallace
WRITING
‘We’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need writing that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good writing would seem to be an art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good writing could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way to both depict this world and illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it’ . Write as if you were dying. At the same time, write as if you write for an audience of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew that you were going to die soon? What would you say to a dying person that would not be enraged by its triviality? What the really great artists do, is they’re entirely themselves. They’ve got their own vision; their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
However, with me, instead of creating some fictional persona, which I am fully aware is possible on the net, I cannot write if I am not my own true authentic self. What you see is what you get. So I share with everyone I’m an old, lonely person and today I, against all odds, turned 67 years of age. I tell my followers (stop it, you’re creeping me out, get a life!)- regretfully the more I put that exact message out there, the more followers I get. So I get a lot of trolls, no hate speech for a while, but trolls who criticize, when they have no idea what I just said. I was out for a walk and Shakespeare entered my head and he posed an interesting question which I will send as a response to my trollers:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind
To suffer the slings and arrows
Of outrageous fortune-
Or take up arms against a sea
Of troubles, and by opposing, end them.
(Now this is from memory so relax if I misquoted Willie- it’s a great ghost story)
And my answer is I’ll take my slings and arrows, and grow a thicker skin. The second option isn’t even an option on the internet at this moment of History. So, I’ll peel away all the layers after layers of unresolved ‘issues’ or ‘traumas’ like peeling an onion. We all have them-traumas.
In writing, everyone has a voice: their own voice. When I write something that doesn’t feel right, I know it immediately. Why? Because I am pretending to be something that I’m not. Good writers can be very good at mimicking. But the game that is played in today’s culture: “Let’s pretend that we’re not pretending,” is the game I’m playing when I write garbage - and it happens when I don’t use my own voice, when I don’t allow myself to be my own true person. Often, I confess, it is to impress somebody - the reader. ‘Look at how erudite and smart I am.’ And I can do that exceedingly well. But it’s garbage. When I am angry I my writing is at the top of its game. And sarcasm, the words write themselves. I’m Irish. It’s in my DNA! Nobody does ‘Gallows humor’ better than the Irish. But I don’t want to be angry and sarcastic. So I go back, get rid of my fucking ‘ego’, throw him into my skeletal closet and begin anew.