I'm reading Tim Parks' book Teach Us to Sit Still. He's in the middle of an intense meditation retreat and is considering giving up writing. It's all so clear to him how language is the problem. It's all so clear to him that books are not life. That the writing life is not really the reality that one sees in meditation, a life.
I'm not ready to give up writing. I like my tools, I just don't want them to be in control of my mind and my soul. I want to see beliefs as beliefs, thoughts as thoughts. The goal of my life is not simplicity, it is the grace and skill to handle complexity.
I love Mingyur Rinpoche's story about the man who decided he was just going to stop saying "I". As though somehow giving up language, or the concept was going to bring us closer to selflessness. No, says Rinpoche, that will just bring us closer to madness. There will always be people who renounce technology in favour of maintaining the old skills. Artists who renounce the new techniques. Portrait painters who would never paint from photographs. And our society is richer for those people, because we need the old skills. It's good to have some refuge from the stresses of constant change. But life's richness is also a function of change and complexity. We can't shy away from that.
