From all the time I spend overanalyzing (an arbitrary act I can't be the only one guilty of), I realize that I'm able to routinely trace all of my issues back to the same core problem: I don't know how to be uncomfortable. I don't know how to be able to feel the good things without being completely deterred from the experience by the inevitably bad. It's something I have to outgrow, because it's certainly not something that is resolvable. It's just...life. And I think we live in a world that's all but curated that mindset for us.
I have the issue of seeing parts of my life as just precursors of time to facilitate getting to where I want to be next. And the sickening reality of that is, given enough of those days, your entire life becomes a waiting game. Now, I've been able to resolve a lot of that nagging, lingering need to escape, but of course, it creeps up on me now and again. So I can't help but be interested in it.
Because it comes from the idea that there will be a happily ever after. You get through the pain and then you bask in having been healed and reconciled and changed and made once again whole and new. But there is no swift motion of starting in darkness and moving toward the light indefinitely. There's a lot of in and out. There's a lot of grey area. There are days you're so far back you can't believe you let yourself get there, and then there are days you forget you were ever miserable to begin with. Getting stunted by this—being fearful of moving forward and more fearful of going back—is the only guaranteed way that it will ruin you.
Because it's a succession of "nows" that will add up, lifting us from awareness of one experience to another, that will be all we have in the end.
So what we see in the experience is what we have to appreciate before we're lifted away from the monotonous routine, because the alternative is that we cease to exist. We're done. And we let things pass because the discomfort made us feel like we were backtracking away from that "light" state we're
perpetually moving toward. We made a bad life out of a few bad experiences because we weren't able to check off the list of things we had in our minds as prerequisites for feeling content, dare I even say...happy? But happiness isn't a contrived mental process that you allow yourself in when things are thought to be right. It's an experience, it is an emotion, and all you have is right now to experience it.
And I see such patterns of thinking facilitated largely by our society. Not only that there will be a happily ever after that we are all entitled to after we've suffered enough, but that joy is in planning for tomorrow. To be very, well, millennial about it (God, I can't believe I'm using this as an example), it's like the Tumblr posts and Pinterest boards that are all images of what we want, hope for, and are inspired by. And it's lovely to look at those beautiful things and decide you want them. But how many of us actually get up and get them—even something as simple as a pretty coffee and book to read by a windowsill? Not many. We get up to complain about not having the lives we dream of and carry on, day after day, rinse and repeat.
Now is all we have, my friends. You have to choose now. You have to live in the heartbreaking reality that is what you see and perceive in this moment...the mess, the beautiful schisms that make for wars and love and peacemaking and harmony and change. The rawness of being so low some days that all you can muster up as your purpose is just to keep breathing—
and then realize that's all there is either way. Maybe it is about diving into the deep end and letting now be more than just enough. Realizing that things are only ever as boring and mundane as we let them be. That there are mysteries and experiences and fascinatingly foreign parts of life that we won't see until we take a step out on the wild side, the side of us that isn't concerned about tomorrow.
96
THE ART of
MINDLESSNESS
Many people have written beautiful pieces about the importance, and their experience, with mindfulness: the ancient practice and supposed modern anecdote to our perpetual dissatisfaction. Live in the moment; be conscious of every sensation of your daily experience. This kind of awareness, in my opinion, is more than just a proposed solution to our human condition, it’s the final frontier, it’s the place we will all find ourselves, at one point or another: either embracing each moment as it comes, or letting them all wash by us—mindlessly. So when I say that what we really have to work on is mindlessness, I by no means am actually talking about not being mindful; it’s just a play on the phrase. (I wanted to clarify in case there was any confusion.)
We talk about the importance of mindfulness in the context of being conscious and present, completely immersed in our experience. That is crucial. But what is also crucial is realizing that much of that has to do with how we can transcend the mind. We live in a culture, and a period of human existence, that is far too concerned with what we think about things.
Though reason is crucial to our development, it sometimes denies our instincts, desires, and pleasures in place of expectation and “normalcy.” We can’t be surprised that when we try to confine the fluid, natural, untamable reality of a human soul that we end up suffering as we do.
We are a species disconnected. For all the technological advancements we’ve made, our ability to connect on a human level is miles away from its natural, primitive state. Our daily discussions are so deeply imbued with value placed on manmade means, we are focused so much on what man can do and not nearly enough on what man is. We are steadily moving away from concepts of religion, associating faith and trust with ignorance as opposed to spiritual intelligence. We simply don’t value the reality of our human existence, the part of us that is up for interpretation, partially because it’s unknown, and mostly because we can’t agree on anything or know for certain, so we deny it rather than embrace its unknownness.
What we think, we become. And if what we are becoming is any indication, we are thinking far too much about the things that don’t matter and not making room for uncertainty, for discomfort, for the things that are indeed unknown but which yield the best outcomes. The ones that are indeed larger than our mind’s comprehension.
In our incessant mindfulness (not in the meditative way, but just in the fact that we process everything psychologically), we start labeling, categorizing, and defining things. We become used to what’s known and disregard what isn’t. This doesn’t leave room for the acceptance of people and things that aren’t like us. We relinquish responsibility by putting other people beneath us. We declare their sentiments wrong and unjust, and therefore we are superior. We live in a culture that makes means and commodity out of ripping each other apart, and it functions healthfully because we buy into it. We love to see how other people aren’t as good as we are, how we can place them beneath us and find comfort in the knowing that we are okay because we are better than them. But we end up caging ourselves. We inevitably fall within what we once said was “wrong,”
because we’re human beings, and dangerous territory is the mind that doesn’t leave room for the soul to falter.
We need to teach our children not to have screaming fits because it makes us look bad as caretakers but because learning to process negative emotions without being scolded and shamed for them is important. We need to become actively, consciously aware of what we are buying, clicking, associating with and inevitably supporting, especially when it serves to do nothing but harm another person (even if we don’t realize it at the time). We have to stop defining people. We have to take our discomfort with the unknown and settle into it firmly, because the fact that we will be uncertain is a certainty. We have to realize that major change can only happen on a minor scale. One individual at a time. We have to move on from our minds and move into our hearts. What makes us the same is something our minds may never be able to understand. We have to let go of trying to understand everything else that’s collateral to suffice for it.
97
THE DIFFERENCE
between
HOW YOU FEEL
and how you think
YOU FEEL
Imagine the last time you had a strong emotional response to something.
Was it the product of having sat with the experience for a moment, processing and internalizing it, and then scanning your body to determine how you felt? Probably not. When we ask one another: “How do you feel about that?” it’s essentially interchangeable with, “What do you think about that?”
Emotions are simple and subtle. When we scan our bodies, we find that they are sensations, and ultimately they boil down to one of two things: tightness or openness. It’s how we interpret that tension or ease that we create thoughts that then exacerbate intense, joyous, debilitating—any extreme—emotions.
This is to say: we create the way we think we feel simply by assigning meaning to sensations. There is a difference between how we feel and how we think we should feel. This is the reason for everything from mob mentality to social conditioning. It’s also largely why people feel “stuck” in inescapable, emotional turmoil. No emotion lasts for any significant period of time—that’s not how they’re designed. It’s only the cognitive patterning that keeps us re-inciting a feeling over and over again, or that keeps us from choosing the course of action that the emotion is guiding us toward.
We are taught how we should feel about roughly everything in life. Our cultural, religious, familial upbringings dictate a set of things that are
“good” and “bad.” Our egos, our desires for survival, superiority, love, acceptance, etc., fill in the rest. We end up with a mental ecosystem of actions and reactions.
These “mental emotions,” as I call them, are by and large the reason we suffer, despite being more evolved than ever before. It is no longer our
fleeting sense of hunger, or desire to mate, that controls us: It’s our thoughts about what it means when someone doesn’t love us, and how our subconscious minds seek confirmation that this is true, and how this repetitiveness creates a belief, and how that belief creates our lives.
We’re taught that either which way you go, a life worth living is one that is highly emotional. It’s full of love, or full of passion, or one in which you persevered through incredible suffering. We believe we should have an opinion on things to know who we are, and worse, we believe we should have an emotional response to feel as though our voices are counted. This is what makes us feel worthwhile—this is what makes life feel worthwhile.
The next time you feel like you’re in an inescapable circumstance, honestly scan your body and see what’s present. Even a tightness or uneasy feeling in your gut is just that—a little bit of stress. That’s it. That is all.
That is all that feeling can do to you. Check back in after an hour, after a day…it will probably be gone.
What you’ll realize is that even your “gut feelings,” your instincts, are not overpowering, huge emotional waves. That’s why it’s called the “little voice within.”
Sometimes we aren’t comfortable with the inherent quietness within us and so we create layers of chaos to distract ourselves from it. But once that chaos becomes exhausting, all you have to do is sit back with yourself and just let yourself feel what you feel, not what you think you feel.
What you’ll realize is that even when your emotions are telling you the worst: “this is not right,” “you need to change,” the manner in which you inherently communicate with yourself is always soft, it’s always gentle, it’s always loving, and it’s always trying to help you.
