I sit here at the beginning of a work day watching my pride play. This weekend I gave a presentation with the Canadian-based NGO, Right to Play, and I’ve been thinking very much about the work-play balance in my life. Things are going well in my career, but as is so often the case I’m having a harder and harder time trying to maintain my self-nurturing rituals. I got on the scale this morning and, well….
I am an animal, and I know, according to the Sapiens books I’m reading, that once we didn’t think of ourselves as better than animals. But we do now. And we’ve created this crazy thriving mess of a shared story. Part formal religions, part quasi-religions, like humanism and capitalism. I wonder if at any point it will really alchemize into a promised land. I think of Pico Iyer after his years of traveling making the decision to spend the rest of his life sitting still in Japan. I think of my own exploits in consciousness. Sitting here feeling the energy play in my body. Expanding, contracting, floating around like a balloon. I am tired, but I’m also elated, in a grounded and creative way, not in some hypomania, trapped in my head way. I am surfing a very interesting spiritual dynamic in my body these days. For the first time in a while, I’m able to stop my thoughts at will. I’ve had this power in the past, but I didn’t think of it as a power and then I lost it. It is the power to think of the future and past as what they really are, wispy nightmares and dreams. And because of this the power to stop thinking of the past and the future.
This is not power in the way that we have defined it in our liberal humanist society as the power to cure disease and stimulate economic growth. It is power over our own mind. It is not the power to craft long-lasting stories about our historic achievements. It is probably closer to the way it has been defined by formal religions, as the power to maintain a spiritual balance in the body. As the power to nurture those things that may be truly sustainable and renewable, wisdom, kindness, compassion. May I build this psychic muscle, stretch it, keep in working. Throughout the nerves of my body. May I taste my self-aversion every day and I know that I can watch it dissolve bit by bit over time. May I spend the next while living off the fat of my body until I become lean and healthy. May I discover once again the pristine consciousness that is and will always be home.
