(2)

It's difficult sometimes to know what attitude or approach one should take towards this life.  Is it better to draw one's sword, enter the fray and battle through – or just relax and "go with the flow"?  Each of us, I suppose, develops his or her own unique philosophy for dealing with life, arrived at via some mysterious alchemical process by which received wisdom and individual psychology are fused.  I once knew, for instance, a man whose temperament was such that he refused to let anything bother him, no matter what it might be.  Whenever something unpleasant or irritating occurred, if ever somebody disagreeable crossed his path, he didn't get upset.  He shrugged off worry and grinned at bad luck – did his best to make things better but then, having once tried, simply forgot all about it.  His unceasing good humor was a source of amazement to me, and I asked him one day how he managed it.  What he told me was, "It's simple, really.  I just realized at a certain point that everything's fucked up.  I mean, I'm fucked up, you're fucked up, the whole fucking world's fucked up – so there's really not much point in worrying about it, is there?  I used to try to figure things out.  And then, somewhere along the way, I realized I couldn't and never would.  So I stopped trying.  I don't think it's a good thing or a bad thing.  It's just that I know that everything's fucked up, and there's nothing I can do about it.  Except," he added, "laugh."  And laugh he did.  He laughed all the time.

Another man I knew told me once that he went through his days feeling always as though he were trying to "wake up."  He said that he felt as if life were just a kind of charade, a deception of the mind, a trick – a trap.  What he wanted, he told me, was to shake free from all illusion, to awaken from the dream of this world into some greater state of awareness, an awareness which, he felt, would be equivalent to a state of bliss.  And all of his life he'd been wondering just how to do this, and struggling to accomplish it.

I've also read stories of certain Buddhist monks who drank and indulged in violent emotions or sexual excess.  Other monks, of course, led very ascetic lives.  The most important point seemed to be to learn how best to comprehend the nature of existence:  asceticism and indulgence were considered to be equally valid paths, so long as the guiding principle was one of coming to understand the impermanence of being.

In the end, I'm not sure which of these ideas to believe.  It seems to me that to say we are simply "fucked up" and leave it at that is not enough.  It is not, so to speak, a "righteous" enough path.  The fucked-up parts of ourselves seem to me to be like knots in our psyches which we must work to untie.  They represent those aspects within us that are least childlike and most childish.  Left unattended, they lead us into a careless sort of self-indulgence that brooks no insight into the nature of being (unless our indulgence ends up making us feel so "lost" to ourselves that we have no other choice but to fight our way back to self-discovery again).  In my experience they are the parts of ourselves most likely to breed laziness, invite self-deception, and end in a kind of self-contempt.  Resolving problem areas within oneself may not solve the greater mystery, but at least it helps loosen the blindfold that keeps us from apprehending that mystery clearly.

And yet, to say that life is ultimately no more than a deception, a charade, an illusion that traps, also does not seem to me to be quite right.  It avoids answering that old, old question, from which so many other questions spring:  Why be born into this world, why have this vast universe, why hear and taste and smell this reality, why be graced with this life, if it is only something which, in the end, we must learn to give up?  Of course, in the end we are forced to give it up anyway; but to say that it was fundamentally pointless all along seems to me contrary to common sense, as well as an inexplicable and indefensible waste of the cosmos' creative energy.

On the other hand, I am inspired to be neither overly indulgent nor unduly abstemious when it comes to my human appetites.  The self-ordaining laws that have made me, via the workings of my personal idiosyncrasies, who and what I am, lead me to believe myself neither saint nor sinner.  I am a common man, with common needs and common desires.  Some of these abet my goal of self-discovery, some lead me astray.  I fend for myself as best I can.

And yet still I ask:  Why is it that I, who have already unraveled so many psychological knots and done away with so much self-destructive behavior, should continue to feel like a man blindly groping his way along some barely discernible path?  Is it that I have come to that impasse whereby a man must learn to "lose his life in order to gain his soul"?  Meaning by "life" all those conceptions of the self that are bound up one way and another with egotism and pride, and by "soul" that which is gained as we learn to see reality for what it really is – whatever that may in the end turn out to be?  As mysterious as all this sounds, it's the nearest I can come to the truth – although the truth need not, I believe, remain forever a mystery . . .

Meanwhile, autumn has arrived here in my small town.  Autumn is the briefest and yet the most changeable of seasons – because it is the season of goodbyes, I suppose.  Yet it is also the season of my birth.  Every year at this time I feel freshly invigorated by the briskness in the air, and a kind of rapture overtakes me at the sight of the fiery hues of the autumn leaves.  Like a phoenix rising once more from the flames, autumn puts me in the mood to shake off my old life and discover myself anew.  Casting aside as much as I can of what has grown false in me, I am left to wonder:  How will I gather my seeds for the coming year?  Will they be able to survive the bitter cold of the winter nights ahead?  And, into what kind of new self will they grow?

DISSATISFACTION