Conflict or Resolution?

(c) All of the above...

As this should be my last post of 2009, we are at that time where traditionally we assemble our resolutions for the upcoming year. This year, however, I am a little conflicted. Err...ok, a lot conflicted. Let me 'splain...

As mentioned before, I am charting a new spiritual life path that owes more to Taoism than anything else. Taoism is virtually impossible to explain, but can be best understood as alignment with universal nature and understanding/acceptance of the inconsequential self. Ambition doesn't much play a role, for it suggests working to take more from life than life readily offers, which in the doing generates turbulence, or conflict. When we make specific resolutions or plans, in the western sense, we are predestined to not live fully in the moment, which puts us in direct opposition to the Tao or path.

We all know that modern planning models require achievability, measurability, a time frame, milestones, etc, as though an infinite universe and our chaotic human experience can be fit neatly into a scientific model. I resolved earlier this year to not fall prey to these sorts of entrapments, so am limiting my 2010 resolutions to approaches rather than objective-based exercises. My hope is that as I review my progress this time next year, I'll find I've adopted life resolutions that have served me well and require little modification going forward.

1. I will strive to be as honest as possible, with myself and with all others with whom I interact.
2. I will seek to be empathetic with others and compassionate toward the suffering of all living beings I encounter.
3. I will work to become closer to nature, to live a life as in balance as possible with nature, and to make intensive interaction with nature a focal point of my life.
4. I will strive to honor the limited time granted to me in mortal existence by making a conscious effort to eliminate from my life all activities and accouterments that do not add real value to my existence or to that of others around me.
5. I will make a conscious effort the be happy, enjoy life, and to share my joy and happiness with others.
6. I will struggle against the overwhelming temptation to offer solutions to others' problems, particularly when my help is not requested.
7. I will continuously work to enhance my spiritual, mental and physical health by studying, meditating, exercising, eating healthily, and maintaining my sobriety.
8. I will work diligently to fully incorporate the Four Noble Truths, The Eightfold Path, and The Twelve Steps into my daily regimen, until they become an ingrained part of my nature.

Ok, I can already hear what you're saying. "Wow, that's some heavy shit!" Well, duh! Number 4 is basically saying, "Don't waste time," which I would be doing if I were adopting meaningless (to me) initiatives that had no value to others or myself, or which I had no intention of keeping. Please note that none of these are exactly measurable, and each I think has a sort of never-ending quality to it that negates the need for periodic upgrades. I think...

A quick dissertation on the challenges of each, and why I include them:

1. I, like every addict, have spent my life a chronic liar. Fortunately for others, the majority (but not all) of my lies have been to myself. I am in no way unique in this respect, but through introspection and counseling I've come to realize that lying is a conditioned pathology that we get better at with practice, and it is a direct impediment to relationships with self, with others and with nature. "To thine own self be true," will be a good maxim to start with...
2. I have a strong tendency to be frankly uncharitable towards individuals, while purportedly compassionate toward groups - like, say...mankind? I've traditionally explained this away by describing myself as "a forest person," rather than a "tree person." While this works organizationally, in one's daily life it is a cop-out, at least for me. I need to open myself up to others and to their individual suffering, which means trusting others, which I apparently have issues with. It will be an interesting challenge and perhaps my toughest.
3. The nature thing is a big one, and tied pretty directly to my Taoist sentiments. I am daily more convinced that the angst of modernity is directly attributable to our disconnect from nature, which has been both the objective and result of western culture. Again, I can only say and act on what applies to me, but I believe that getting back as close to nature as possible will be the wellspring of spiritual peace and mental health that I have been unconsciously seeking for a long while. The wife fears my going all Jeremiah Johnson, and I won't deny the appeal. My intent, however, is to bring as much of nature into my life as is reasonably possible, and to discard as much of "civilization" as is responsibly discardable, then evaluate the result and see how it feels and works.
4. As stated above, simply "Don't waste time." I have long held a sense of my own mortality and the temporal and temporary nature of human existence much more strongly than most folks I know. This is in no way distressing to me, but rather motivates me to extract as much as possible from every moment of living. Unfortunately, this sentiment has been honored only conceptually to this point. I now intend to actualize it.
5. I am a bleak dreary bastard for the most part, or am seen to be by many who know me, and I've decided this simply isn't acceptable. My lack of expressed joy has been, for the most part, due to my allowing life to live me, rather than vice-versa. I intend henceforth to live life fully and completely, and believe the resultant joy will evidence itself to those around me with no significant effort on my part. I fully expect this to be the simplest commitment I'm making to myself this upcoming year and all that follow.
6. This one I've already started on, and its a toughie. Being the problem solver is an ingrained part of my nature, and is also a classic co-dependent behavior. Suffice to say that I have plenty of my own problems to solve, a massive ego to subdue, and an undeveloped sense of humility that needs plenty of nurturing. Hopefully what you see in my blog will be the sum total of my unsolicited problem solving tips, which are, when offered, not what I suggest will work for you, but only what have, at least in some instances, worked for me.
7. Get serious about my program and quit dancing around it.
8. Ibid.

Not exciting this week, sorry. For you. For me, it has been pretty cathartic, and I would say has set a bit of an attitudinal benchmark against which to measure myself and my friends who are inclined to measure me over the course of upcoming months and years. As I reread the above I recognize the theme, and am satisfied with the consistency. I am in fact resolving only to make me a better me, rather than changing the world over which I have little control or even effect. Perhaps in so doing, I might add a little more than I take away, and leave existence at least a slight bit better than I found it. I'm not sure how much more than that we can realistically shoot for...

Happy Holiday all! And good-bye and good riddance to 2009!

Bah Humbug!

Here's hoping everyone is well into the spirit of the season, and that your shopping is all knocked out...

"Modern consumer demand, at the margin, does not originate from within the individual, but is a consequence of production. It has two origins:

1. Emulation: the desire to keep abreast of, or ahead of one's peer group — demand originating from this motivation is created indirectly by production. Every effort to increase production to satiate want brings with it a general raising of the level of consumption, which itself increases want.
2. Advertising: the direct influence of advertising and salesmanship create new wants which the consumer did not previously possess. Any student of business has by now come to view marketing as fundamental a business activity as production. Any want that can be significantly moulded by advertising cannot possibly have been strongly felt in the absence of that advertising — advertising is powerless to persuade a man that he is or is not hungry."

From The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith 1958

(Special kudos to all my brilliant Facebook friends who helped me zero in on this quote. Note to self: having smart friends way beats sitting through 4-8 years of exhaustive university education...)

This is an easy year for me to write these thoughts, my income being approximately 60% of 2008's which was approximately 60% of 2007's, which was fortunately a very good year or we'd be standing on a street corner with cardboard signs. I went out and shopped a little today, was gratified that the mall didn't seem disgustingly crowded nor traffic intolerably bad. Some of this feeling on my part might be attributable to my more mellow disposition after more than 6 months of continuous sobriety and extensive therapy, but most I believe is due to the fact that we Americans have been well and truly whacked upside our collective head with a stout cudgel of economic reality, and are in an appropriately defensive posture. Good on us, and about time I say...

Galbraith published this book in 1958, the year my overly fertile mother birthed me as the fourth of what would eventually be five children. It was not uncommon for families to have only one car, while two was a status symbol. Dishwashers and clothes dryers were still tres chic, and women working outside the home were a rarity, at least in my suburban middle class childhood. Also rare were credit cards, charge accounts, frivolous bank loans, low-interest zero down mortgages, and a whole array of devices contrived jointly by marketers and financiers to encourage American consumers into colossal fiscal irresponsibility. And it is from that tree that the cudgel was formed with which we have been whacked and which leaves us woozy and somewhat unwilling to reach for our pocketbooks this festive season. Well, again, good on us I say!

I will have to come back at some other time after I've zeroed in on the source, to share another economic notion of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, namely that virtually all our society's actual needs had been met, and all that remained to drive increased production, consumer spending, corporate profits, etc, were wants, either real or created by marketers. Hence, we had the advent heyday of Madison Avenue, the onset of the grotesque commercialization of Christmas (and now other holidays as well), and the current AMC hit, Mad Men (which I've never watched, but am considering as treadmill fare as I grow weary of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda, Big, the screaming baby, et al...)

At my Saturday morning AA meeting, one fellow was sharing his Christmas memories from his childhood spent with his mother and step-father, when times were rough enough that the family members all crafted presents for each other, wrapped them in butcher paper decorated with poster paints, and placed them under the tree. He was smiling when he told the story, and remembering the simple joys of family and sharing and having everything they needed. I remember Christmases like that myself - still regularly use the boot jack my brother made for me in the family workshop more than thirty years ago now...

I don't really have a problem with Christmas as a concept, but what it's become holds no appeal for me, and hasn't in some time. As my children are grown and soon to be on their own, I am glad that they've enjoyed some of the sparse Christmases our conditions have provided, and am pleased that they don't much associate spending and getting with love and sharing. I can't help but think that their attitudes toward Christmas are likely much nearer those that old Saint Nicholas had in mind when he purportedly started all this business a millennium ago.

Speaking of Saint Nicholas, who else out there finds Bill Bennett to be an insufferable pompous ass? Happy Holiday all!

Opening Bell

So there, I've done it. My sponsor and my therapist and all the self-helpers in the world say I need to journal, get in touch with my thoughts and feelings, put them on paper. Well, here we go then...

I've got to shovel some breakfast pretty quick, get showered up for my Saturday morning meeting, and on with the errands de jour, so will likely wrap up later. I promise that I won't make a habit of mundane posts, but this is my first and I started it myself, so we'll call it my first "public" step on a path I've been traveling semi-privately for some time. And you know they say that every journey begins with the first step. Thanks for being here with me...

You'll note that my url is www.fluxandanchor.blogspot.com, referring to some books by a writer named Jack Chalker (just looked it up) back in the mid 80s. To my recollection I only read one, likely Masters of Flux and Anchor, but don't hold me to it. The gist was that the universe is comprised of the stuff of existence in two broad forms. "Flux" is the unperceived, formless, chaotic stuff of the universe, and "anchor" is the world of matter and energy that we are familiar with, with all its rules and limitations. By having a Zen-like relationship with the whole shebang one could transcend the conventional limitations of time and space. I would like to think that my universal construct derived from something deeper and more fact-based than a mid 80s science fiction series, but at the moment I can't swear to it. I do know that what I just wrote (in terms of the composition, not the transcendence) very accurately describes my deeply held belief on the nature of the universe. Fair warning, then, that from time to time we may wander together into some less traveled realms on our journey...

My original blog title, Another Path, was intended to convey a theme on multiple levels. I myself am on a new personal spiritual path, which I happily share with visitors to these pages and anyone else who cares to tag along. I don't yet have a label for it, and may not. I can say that it is definitely eastern in nature, with hints of Buddhism and Taoism but I'm not certain proximity to either. It is definitively non-western and non-Abrahamic, which is a wee bit of an achievement from one raised and living in what is often referred to as the buckle of the Bible belt. As I chart this new course, it is naturally affecting my personal life, relationships, business, and all the other ick and goo of existence, and I have no idea where any of it will wind up.

On another level, I will be both following and promoting a new path that I strongly feel much of the world is approaching - one which deviates from our current fealty to consumerism, laissez faire capitalism, dark-age religions, nationalism, and disregard for ourselves, our species, our fellow living beings, and our planet. I've been counseled by many to focus on myself and let the rest tend to itself, which is very much a Tao/Zen approach to existence. I do know that I need to be whole and healthy to be of ultimate service to others, but also that our mortal existence is limited in duration and that I've squandered at least half of my most productive years so have ground to make up. Having lived more than half a century now, I have developed a tiny bit of the patience so lacking in my tender years, but not so much that I feel comfortable sitting by calmly as the world consumes itself under the guidance of myopic self-serving megalomaniacs, if you know what I mean...

If you haven't noticed, I'm an abuser of ellipses - absolutely love them. Sorry, but its my blog and I can if I want to. I can think of no better literary convention to express the fact that a thought is unfinished. Most of mine are. Some intentionally...

So, to wrap up my first entry, visitors can expect to encounter musings on politics and geo-politics, science, religion and spirituality, relationships, addiction and recovery, and occasionally sex or cooking. If you catch me getting into a rut, please put a boot up my ass and get me out of it. I will do my best to stay away from pop culture, of which I know very little, and music or art, of which I know even less. Anything else is fair game. It will take me a few entries to figure out the formatting, achieve a coherent style, and develop a level of competency in composition and presentation, so I hope you will bear with me and that the metamorphosis isn't too grotesque to observe. I hope to not bore you too much, and will welcome your commentary and guidance. I am sharing this growing experience with you in hopes that your company will help me grow, and that perhaps from time to time you'll take something away that makes your life a little bit richer.