Find Your Way Back
Damsel, I say unto thee, arise, Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max (1840-1915)
One lives for a very short time, and life is incomparably precious. To live has much less to do with the senses or with ambition than with the asking of questions that never have been surely answered. To ask and then to answer these questions as far as one can, one needs above all a priceless and taxing involvement with truth and beauty. These are uncommonly plentiful in music and painting, in nature itself, in the sciences, in history, and in one's life as it unfolds—if one labors and dares to see them.
--Mark Helprin, “The Canon Under Siege”
Truth! Beauty! Love!
--George Emerson in the film adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Room With a View
I've been lost for a little while. I have been living beneath my privileges. I have spent my labor for that which cannot satisfy. Instead of a "priceless and taxing involvement with truth and beauty," I've had a cheap and exhausting affair with the fake and the trivial.
Frittering--that's what I've been doing. Even as I've stuck to my resolution to make better choices for my body, I have chosen junk and laziness in the realm of the mind and spirit. I have read bad books in the name of agent reconnaissance, when I should have known after a few pages of any one of them that if an agent felt passionate about this particular story, s/he is not the agent for me.
Worse, I have wasted hours in worship of the internet. The worldwide web has been for me a medium of joyous and productive exchange with dear friends; a fount of time-saving research; and a vehicle of much aesthetic inspiration. But I have let it become the opposite of all of those things: a place of counterfeit connection; a site for time-wasting trivia-mining; and an agent of anaesthesia.
It's that last--my compulsive search for self-medication--that troubles me most. Like Edmund in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I have developed a taste for enchanted Turkish Delight, and that bad magic food has decreased my desire for good, ordinary food. There's nothing sleazy or sordid in my etheric trawling, but its banality reminds me of Ecclesiastes: "all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun." Why have I felt the urge to numb my mind? From what am I hiding?
While practicing yoga this morning, I contemplated my physical weaknesses: wobbly arms, tight hamstrings, noisy brain. Yoga forces one to consider one's actual state of being in the current moment, as opposed to indulging in wishful thinking about past or future "ideal" states. Yoga also teaches one to accept rather than to judge the deficiencies that naturally come into view under such consideration of the here and now. In that way, yoga is a mirror of the ideal life, in which one "labors and dares" to see the truth and beauty in the present, in one's life as it unfolds.
Post-yoga, with a resolve to be kind and dispassionate, I view my spiritual weaknesses. The willfulness and stubborn streak a mile wide. The pride, born of insecurity and a desire for acceptance. The strong tendency towards doing as little as possible. The default to procrastination.
These things won't go away overnight. It may take years until my heels will come to the ground in Adho Mukha Svasana--Downward Dog Pose; it may take decades before I learn true humility. That's okay. Right now, it is enough to be aware and to be stretching gently toward change.
But the settling for idle, disconnected consumption when I could be engaged in active, engaged creation--that feels like something that needs to change right now. The internet is not my friend. I need to be aware of its traps even as I use it for good and healthy purposes. I need to extend the mindfulness I find in yoga to the rest of my life. When I remember who I am and what I really want to be doing, the attraction of enchanted Turkish Delight is greatly lessened.
I'm going to go stand in an apple tree and shout my creed to the heavens: Truth! Beauty! Love! Those are the things I treasure; those are the things I'll pursue.