Life Is Always Sliding Out of Control
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days. This is number eleven.
Recently, I started taking long morning walks with my wife, and I was surprised by how happy it made me. Which is totally ridiculous. I’m already convinced of the value of exercise and sunlight. At times, exercise has been a cornerstone of my way of life. And, in fact, I’ve often waxed poetic about how wandering around is necessary to human contentment. But my behavior just wasn’t aligned with my current values.
On the other hand, it’s not, maybe, that ridiculous; nobody is ever fully aligned with all of their current values. Life is always sliding out of control. You’re always performing some set of actions that are designed to work towards whatever your desires were at some point in the past. Maybe yesterday, maybe six months ago. But your desires are different today. Now you have to correct for that. And that correction will then require correction, at some point. That’s all that ever happens.
The game you’re playing today is a game started by another player. They maybe saved the game at kind of an awkward moment. They left you incomplete directions.
Things have changed now. You’ve spent a year grinding away at getting your business going, and now it’s time to embrace life, touch grass, get in touch with a more embodied experience, take a tantric sex class, cook meals again. Flash forward six months, you’re fully embodied and you can have six hundred orgasms but you realize that all your new healthy friends give you the creeps—and, it turns out, your authentic self that you’ve tapped into really wants money and power. This is all bixicated, you say, as you hop on a plane to San Francisco.
There is always some friend, essential to your picture of the world, who you haven’t talked to in too long. The people are all leaving. Some precious piece of knowledge is evaporating from your mind. You placed yourself in a trance, and now, that you wake from a trance, you find clarity at last. But this is another trance, another role selected based on a past decision.
You will wake up halfway, one day, in another life. Probably you’ll never wake up fully. People who wear robes and knit their brows say that you can wake up fully by wearing a robe and knitting your brow. This seems awfully convenient—but maybe they’re right. That’s something you used to think about a lot, when you were really interested in meditation. Oh yeah, you haven’t done a single minute’s meditation since last September. It’s time to get on that. Or not.
One day, after I forget to do so for a year or two, I’ll start taking morning walks again. I’ll wonder why I ever gave it up, what possible excuse I could’ve had. Everything will seem so obvious. It will be finally so simple, as of that morning. Then, I will finally understand.
beautiful