Let Go, Let Taoism

I heard a person say the other day a phrase familiar to me from my Christian past: “Let go and Let God.”

Immediately I thought about the Taoist concept of wu-wei, not-doing, which means that you don’t work against the flow, but move with it. You let go of trying to force things – you let the universe do its thing.

It’s not often I feel like Christianity and Taoism share concepts, but when it comes to Christ admonishing his followers not to worry, because God dresses the flowers in the field and feeds the sparrow,  I think Lao-Tze would nod his head. “God” or “Tao,” here, refers to this mysterious and yet totally natural and mundane aliveness – Dylan Thomas’ green life force – that doesn’t die when one of us dies, that doesn’t stop. We can worry or not worry, but the storm will come, the sun will shine, the ozone layer will diminish, babies will be born, people will die. We can have a temper tantrum about it, or we can accept it, and enjoy it while we’re here. We have that choice. When you see yourself as living within the whole, whether you picture that whole as being the hand of a benevolent deity or not, you see yourself, I believe, in the right perspective. Worry becomes irrelevant. Your relationship to the whole matters more than whether you get your way about a small particular or not.

Which reminds me of this paradoxical quote:

What you do is of little significance, but it is very important that you do it.
-M.K. Gandhi

And I will bow to the flow and let this post go right here.

Honesty vs. Kindness

A woman told her husband of 13 years, I don’t love you anymore.

She was going through intense therapy. A few months later, she realized, No, she did love him. But it was too late. He’d been hurt. There marriage ended soon afterward.

The woman – my mother – was being honest with her husband – my father. And isn’t honesty the best policy?

This causes me to have one of those internal debates that then drives me to write before I start talking to myself in public. I can argue some opposing points:

1) In a relationship, you don’t always need to be 100% divulging all the time of everything in your heart. Keep your mouth shut. The truth might take some time to surface. If my mother had waited a few months, she could have avoided hurting my father and losing him forever.

2) It’s a good thing my mother told dad how she felt, even though it was hard, and possibly a passing feeling. The fact that he couldn’t hear it and handle it is proof that they needed to split up.

3) My mother told the truth, and maybe regretted it, but it was the truth, and she should have stood by it, instead of backtracking when the consequences hurt.

4) Mom should have valued his feelings and the relationship over her need to spill her guts out. The edit button is helpful to preserve relationships.

What do you think?

There are definitely times when speaking everything on your mind is just not the kindest way to be honest. Telling your boss her breath stinks, for instance. Telling your neighbor you hate the way she does her hair. Confessing to your spouse that you wish he would lose some weight. These may all be truthful, honest statements – but do they reflect the truth of your care and concern for that person?

The other thought here goes back to good old Jesus – love thy neighbor as thyself. Be honest and truthful to yourself. So this means, in my mother’s case, that she needed to honor her truth. Maybe that didn’t mean telling Dad she didn’t love him anymore – but maybe she could tell him she was in a really hard place. Maybe she needed some things from him to honor the process she was going through – or maybe telling him her feelings was indeed honoring her truth, conducting herself with integrity, and despite his reaction, she should be proud of herself.

I’m sure there isn’t – is there ever! – a black and white answer to this conundrum. For myself, I grew up very much pleasing other people whatever it took in terms of playing down or shaving off any rough edges poking through that might cause displeasure or provoke alarm. Speaking my truth with kindness for myself and others is a challenge I am just now learning to tackle.  Letting others be responsible for their reactions is a crucial part of it.

The truth can definitely be a sword.

Is it possible to wield it gently?

A Website for Happiness: Who knew?

I know there’s all kinds of websites, but this is just ridiculous:

This world needs more happiness. Obviously – even in a cushy society like ours, we have websites like the one above.

The Bad Rap on Happy
Growing up a Christian, finding happiness wasn’t really high on my priority list. Happiness was disdained as something self-serving, self-indulgent, and not quite as grounded or as elite as “joy,” which I remember being defined in my young head as ‘a good feeling even though you are suffering, because you’re suffering for the right reasons.’ Being happy was considered a transitory state – not like deep, abiding joy. Later, when I was studying Buddhism, there seemed to be a similar nose-wrinkle about all things ‘happy.’ Definitely, even as a poetry student, Truth and Beauty and Love landed higher scores than silly old happiness.

And Happy is the dwarf who seems a little too, right?

Even in the broader American culture, there exists bias against happiness. Wives aren’t supposed to be happy, but loyal; men aren’t supposed to be happy, just satisfied; kids aren’t supposed to be happy, but good. And lots of happiness is just stupid, right?

On the other hand, in our youth-worshipping world, we idolize childhood as the time of happiness, and we long to return to it, we’re jealous of it, bitter and resentful that kids get to be happy… to want to be happy gets in the way of enlightenment, stability, security, success, all the things that feed the culture’s image of itself – but not the individual.

Reconsidering
I’ve given happiness a second chance.  But it’s definitely new for me to consider seeking happiness as a worthwhile enterprise. I kind of like it. I’m finding that happiness is not as superficial or selfish as advertised.

Marcus Aurelius agrees: “Happiness is a good god within.” (And hey, if a Roman dude says so…)

If happiness is a goodness – a good thing to have and to desire – the pursuit of! – I feel a kind of gentle leniency enter into my perspectives of others whom I might otherwise judge on the harsh side.

That is, if you evaluate people’s choices based on an external set of rules vs. the level of their internal happiness, you’re often going to dislike their choices.

Lizards
Like, for instance, getting a lizard tail attached permanently to your bottom. I read about this several years ago in Harper’s – there’s at least one, probably more, surgeon whose specialty is giving people butterfly wings and other animal-esque add-ons. It’s tattoos and plastic surgery taken just that one step further…

… I was kind of horrified and disgusted when I first read about this – and disturbed that individuals wouldn’t be satisfied with their own bodies, and worried about the implications for biological ethics.

But really – if lizard-tail guy is happy? If the god within him is delighted with that tail, if his soul is cheerfully singing, then I am happy for him. Truly.

Now, that is, in a way, an easy scenario. Presumably, the lizard tail can be delivered without the expense of any one else’s happiness. That’s where things get tricky. Sometimes you find your ultimate happiness – and someone else has to pay for it. Or so it seems.

The Messy Side of Happy
I’m going to be radical and say that happiness, just like love, is not always distributed fairly. Sometimes it’s messy and expensive.

Often someone profits from another’s misery – often unintentionally, though sometimes knowingly. For instance:

• A gorgeous diamond ring! but workers in South Africa suffered to mine it
• You win the spot on the cheerleading squad! But that other girl who had wanted it so badly lost out to you, and will cry herself to sleep
• You choose  your happiness, which means to go live in another country – causing your parents deep unhappiness that you are so far away

Etc. The relationship between suffering and happiness and the choices we make – ah, that’s a book I’m sure many a philosopher has already written more thoroughly than I could even attempt… it definitely gets messy.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want…
But ultimately I believe that we are each responsible for finding our own happiness. It’s not something else someone can deliver to you or anyone else’s duty to preserve for you.

Elizabeth Lesser writes in her book The Seeker’s Guide that  (I’m paraphrasing): you can get what you want – but you can’t get what you want all the time, or get everything you want.

This rule definitely applies to happiness. In some ways, my early instruction was correct: Happiness can be fleeting. It is never some permanent end-state blacking out all sorrow or grief. You can find some happiness – but you can’t escape all sadness. Both are part of the human experience.

I think I can safely conclude that you’ll be happier if you learn to treat happiness with some respect. So remember:

• When you find it, let yourself have it, fully – honor and relish it
• When others find it, let them enjoy it, without jealousy, bitterness, or judgment
• It’s not always going to be pretty or easy
• It’s never going to last forever (nothing will)

I guess I am probably still biased toward truth and all that. But I think it’s important to give ourselves and others permission to be happy.

I doubt a website can do it for anybody, but you know, if it makes you happy…

Where Do All the Hippies Go?

To the tune of “Where did all the cowboys go…”

It’s a strange Cville phenomenon: Hippies appear in some expected, some unexpected places – like little rabbits peeking out of the undergrowth. You can find them fingering the organic cabbage at IY or playing the ukele on the downtown mall. Sometimes you’ll spot one randomly biking on an odd stretch of 250. There were several of them at the Scottsville 4th of July gathering, doing the ‘country’ thing. And yes, many are at the Tea Bazarr or your nearest yoga studio.

What’s the problem, you ask.

This place is expensive, I answer. Really expensive. And for all the fuss about the artsyness of this place, it’s not the kind of grungy, downhome environment that normally breeds hippies. Cville’s downtown mall features a store for dog and horse lovers, for goodness’ sake. It supports chic and overpriced paper shops. There aren’t any head shops or incense coops, you know what I’m saying?

So, where do they go? Where do they live? How do they afford it?

Current theories:

a) They all secretly turn into Cville businesspeople when I’m not looking – the Chill-powered execs in Chinos and blue shirts with ties – the dreds are really wigs -

b) There’s an underground commune where they cohabitate

c) They’re squatting in Keswick

d) They all secretly turn into rednecks when I’m not looking

I’m guessing this is all offensive enough to inspire some comments. But truly, I really do want to know. The hippies I knew when I was at college in Richmond actually did manage to scrape by on pennies and had several Africa houses to support their incense habits. That made sense to me. I knew where they went. There was cheap, greasy housing and cheap, greasy food and an abundance of hippies made sense.

But here? I just don’t get it. Can someone clue me in?

A Short, Bright Life

My grandmother, in her upper 80s, having strokes, has now been struck with anxiety. Her mother died of strokes. She is now on the precipice of her own demise.

When I imagine what it’s like to be my grandmother, in her body, in one of her 99 pairs of shoes, I feel her panic as young as my own, the hot volcanic fear of that door being shut, your mind buried and blacked out.

I learned about fireflies this summer – that they live underground until they appear in June, rising with the heat, and then live for maybe two weeks, tops, a short, bright life during which they signal to possible mates, urgently blinking on and off, Let’s procreate!

It’s a two-week long orgy of reproductive sex. And then the light goes out.

This makes me think several things:

1. No matter when we die, whether after two weeks or 88 years, our lifespan may feel like it was too short. It is never enough. So while I might conclude that Gee, at least I live longer than two weeks! it’s really not that much of a helpful contrast.

2. I’m so glad that a human life is more than a speedy rev of mating lust.

3. Is a human life more than a speedy rev of mating lust?

4. Why do I have an internal reaction of disdain that the pretty luminous flickerings of fireflies is nothing more than a dance for reproduction? Why do I find that kind of vulgar? Why do I want the patterened pulses to be discussions of flower art? Why do I resist the idea that biologically, Life wants to reproduce as its main mission, and to acknowledge that force within myself as well?

I guess I would like for us to have ‘higher’ goals at the core of existence – spiritual evolution, not just physical reproduction. I’m reading Mother Nature right now, and so many male primate behaviors are explained by the desire to promote and protect the passing on of one’s own genes. That kind of disgusts me. I want human beings to transcend genetic transference. I want us to practice agape and compassion for others of our species, whether or not we share genetic material. I want there to be an inherent generosity of spirit in the human DNA…

But then I run into a conflict with myself -the part of me that balks at any notions of the abstract/spiritual layer of a person as rising “above” the physical realm. Instead, I believe the physical and spiritual (mental, emotional) parts of a human are interlaced, and you can’t untangle one from the other. And one is not better than another…

Thinking this way butts against centuries of gnostic and Christian dualism, however, that are deeply imbedded in our language and thinking.

5. Is it ‘firefly’ or ‘lightning bug’?

6. Whatever our goals in life, whether we manage to mate or not, reproduce or not, live for a week or a year, our lives blink with radiance and beauty. There is, for us human beings, no real set amount of time that we are ’supposed’ to live. There is only the time that we do live. And for me, there is no external comfort to offer my grandmother regarding her death. There is no invisible god waiting to catch her when she jumps off the cliff of her life. There is only the joy that comes from what is, the time that we have at this very moment, which is special precisely because it is not eternal.

7. Sometimes the meaning of our lives, the beauty in them, is found, not in our own limited perspective, but in our part within the whole. I don’t care so much whether firefly X manages to sire a next generation. But the light of his bulb delights me, makes an evening magical – another instance of nature’s effervescence that kindles a flame in my heart.

How lovely my grandmother is to me, for she is similarly bright.

Of course, I am a product of her successful reproductive efforts – so I am grateful – but more so, happy to have been around her, witness to her smile, the way she eats off other people’s plates in a way that’s charming and not annoying…