Just "be"

You're angry, sad, elated....you're one of the many varietals of human emotions we're capable of.

Experience it.

Just "be."

Life is all dynamics. It's the now. It's what you make of it in the moment you're living. The John Lennon quote, "Life is what happens while you're busy making plans," is on target. If you are always living in some sort of limbo of waiting for what you planned to happen, you're missing out on some great events in the meantime.

Same goes for living a "what if." As a student of history, I can vouch for the fun of hypotheticals. Yet, the more time we dedicate to trying to determine what could have been and/or expending energy on these missed potentials, the less time we have to dedicate to our true experiences in this world. We can safely say that appeasing Hitler in WW2 was not effective; if we wanted to spend more time on debating what should have been done instead, we're missing an opportunity to simply learn from the past. There will never be another situation that is exactly the same as that historical one, so any sort of conjecturing will only end up being hypothetical again. It's a human tendency to try to "figure things out" but it can be done to a fault. Which brings me back to the experiencing of the now.

Once language gets involved in the human mind, we have the capacity to "think" about our experiences in a more analytical sense. This is not necessarily a bad trait we've evolved to have, but it can lead to anguish. We "desire" something to be different than it is, so we brood (think) about how it could be different, how people could be so stupid, et. al. But what if we dropped the facade of thought and just experienced it?

When I was 16, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by American philosopher, Robert Pirsig. The book was slow-going at first, as I have never read anything quite like it, and I hated him as a narrator (and person) until about halfway through. But the description of his descent into what the outside world viewed as insanity, the loss of control he experienced (in the midst of trying to maintain absolute control) really struck a chord. Eventually, I would go through a similar experience (see previous post). Maybe reading his book helped me through, to see that these crises can happen to anyone at any point in their lives. But who knows.

So I leave you with his thoughts on this matter:

“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values