I read a wonderful piece in Tricycle magazine today about what a spiritual life looks like. The timing for me to read it was perfect. It’s something I’ve been trying to make sense of recently.
We are very much a doing world. Even the language of therapy is often about doing. Everyone seems to come in and say to me, “I need to work on myself,” or “I need to work on my relationships.” The sentiment is understandable. We are a self-improvement culture. Our lives are viewed linearly, our lives a constant striving for self-improvement with a beginning, middle, and end. There is much usefulness in seeing the world this way. It is goal-orientated and results-focused first and foremost. It has helped create the world around us, including the computer I type on now or the smartphone I use to answer my emails and check social media. A lot of us internalize this productive voice and hear it in the daily chatter of our thinking self and assume this is who we are.
“Do you pray?” I once asked a patient.
“No, I’ve never been able to for some reason” she paused. “Do you?”
“No,” I said. “Because I don’t know if anyone is listening.”
It has always struck me as inconceivable that someone is listening to prayer. How can people be sure of some divine force in their lives? Even such Christian luminaries such as Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa experienced their doubts about God. I am no different. God does not speak to me in tongues or voices. All I hear are silent ellipses where I sense holiness in the mundane, the awe-inspiring in the ordinary. God has always seemed like an inelegant, hollow solution to the problem of meaning and death.
Everything's amazing and nobody's happy- Louis C.K.
“To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.”
― Ernest Becker
A few years ago, a patient of mine wondered out loud why he was unhappy. After all he was a successful lawyer, involved in a loving relationship with a partner, lived in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Brooklyn and had a group of close friends whom he saw socially. So what was wrong? "Something just doesn't feel right. I have the gnawing feeling that something should be different," he said.
A thought occurred to me as I scrolled my Twitter feed, then clicked on the Candy Crush knock-off game I play too much, and then on a YouTube video. While I may feel like a living sentient being with human feelings, in a very real way to the modern economy I am treated first and foremost as a commodity.
Perfectionism is a disease among my patients. People’s inner dialogues these days are unrelenting. The oddity of this all is that the more perfect someone might seem on the outside, often times the more broken they are on the inside. (Of course, this isn’t everyone by any means). It takes a ceaseless, judging superego to maintain the veneer of perfection to the outside world, and any sort of crack in the crevices of one’s soul proves that one is messing up.
I ask myself often: why are so many suffering from this perfectionism? There is no doubt that perfectionism is a defense, but a defense against what? Well like a lot of defenses, perfectionism begins in childhood. Even supposed good parents are not immune to pushing their children to achievements and praising someone for what they do. Even the statement, “I want you to be happy” is an imperfect one to say to a child. You might say I’m picking nits here, how can saying you want your child to be happy be imperfect parenting? It’s simple, saying you want your child to be happy, implies that if a child doesn’t feel happy, then there are doing something wrong. Subtleties like this can lead to a more judging mind. I suggest an alternative: telling a child that it’s ok to feel whatever they feel, allowing them to express who they are, and then going from there.
Our society is another reason perfectionism reigns supreme. The truth is in the modern economy we are in competition. Capitalism breeds it, encourages it. The free market, according to some, is a meritocracy, and those corporations or people who are unworthy get weeded out. To put it another way: only the strong survive. Whether we realize it or not, this is embedded deep in the American psyche. As a result, we naturally feel competitive with our peers. I can’t tell you how many of my patients cannot celebrate the successes of their friends and peers, how it inevitably makes them feel jealous.
Social media as we know encourages this competition as well. The rise of influencers is an extreme example of this, people paid to show a fantasy lifestyle that in no way resembles reality, but unconsciously gives up an example of what life should look like even if reject what we’re seeing. It’s sort of like junk food. Sure, in small doses it's fine, but eat it every day, and you start to feel sluggish. On a more subtle level are the more prosaic everyday social media posts, the reels, the photos of your friends having fun. This can be a good thing, to see what people in your life are up to, but again like junk food, if you consume it constantly, it will start to have effects, which you probably aren’t even aware of, creating expectations of what life should be. (I try to encourage patients to consciously consume social media, even following therapy-like accounts which encourage self-reflection).
A person who is well-adjusted in my opinion has nothing to do with a so-called perfect life. It is the person who can accept their life and their feelings just as they are. Every moment is a chance to awaken our hearts just a little more, to grow with self-love and compassion for ourselves. Inevitably if we can give ourselves self-love, it eventually extends out to all the people in our life.
It is important to define what “self-love” is, however. It is not the praise of our parents or society for “doing well” or “achieving.” It is not the easy victories of vanity, of being beloved by the outside world. Those things feel good, of course, but if one’s self-esteem is built on that, one’s self-esteem inevitably collapses when that is taken away. Self-love means letting yourself fuck up and embracing that. It is a kind and gentle attitude towards one’s self. It means allowing ourselves to feel whatever we feel without judgment, but with love and attention. When we allow this something happens, we can feel actual joy for life. As I’ve said before, “doing” stops being the lens we see the world. We can just be, just as we are, imperfect beings of light.
A recent observation: we are a society that hates boredom. After all, why be bored when we have so many entertainment options? If I am in a long line at the post office, I could stand there doing nothing, waiting patiently for the slow, tortoise line to move an inch. Or I could look at my phone and connect to a million entertainment options at the touch of a fingertip.
I can listen to music, a podcast, watch a movie on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon or Disney+ or stream a video on Youtube or stream a live sporting event or play a game or read an article or check my social media accounts. All of these options make the time fly by so we don’t have to face the monotony of everyday life. And everyday life without these options can be incredibly boring. I’ve observed with many of my patients that they use screens and entertainment constantly because they are afraid of aloneness, of boredom, of being alone with their thoughts. They will use anything to escape that feeling because underneath it all they are afraid. I can certainly relate to this, especially if you’re feeling depressed or anxious. Who wants to live in the purgatory of the depressed or anxious mind?
But something is lost in a society that needs to constantly be stimulated. As others have suggested boredom is essential to creativity. I think about writing right now, typing on my computer. How did I come up with the idea to write this? I sat on the subway yesterday on my ride home. Usually, I would do a crossword puzzle or read a book. But yesterday I just sat there with nothing to do. I tried to meditate, stay with the moment, but as it is wont to do, my mind began to drift. Before I knew it I thought this blog and started thinking about ideas, and I found myself reflecting on my boredom. And now I am here typing this article.
Of course, nothing about what I say is groundbreaking. There are countless stories of artists using boredom for their creativity. I think of one of my favorite poets, Frank O’Hara. While he worked at the MOMA in the 1950s, he wandered midtown Manhattan during his lunch, as a way to stimulate his creativity. He could have searched for easy office pleasures and chatted with someone or read a magazine. But O’Hara knew that he needed his mind to wander in order to make connections for his poems. During his walks, he had no headphones or iPhones, or any other distraction because they had not been invented yet. He just walked and observed and wrote some beautiful poems. (“Steps” in particular is a favorite of mine). Of course, it could be argued that Midtown Manhattan is anything but boring. But I think that misses the point. Creativity needs a large meadow for the sheep to roam. Enclose the space of the mind too much, and we lose something.
And as many poets have suggested boredom could be viewed as a deficiency in how we see the world. As Rilke once said, “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
There is much truth to this. I am often amazed at how often people miss the wonders of existence. Trees, for example, have become holy to me, windows into the divine spirit right before eyes. I don’t see them that different than a church. They are temples in themselves. They have their own organic, harmonious beauty, breathing and growing and dying all at once. I have spent many any afternoon, staring at the barks of trees, the structure of branches, the gentle, undulating fall of the leaves to the ground in autumn. There is a divine dance happening here, that I feel blessed to witness.
I realize that this is quite a sentimental view of trees. I can hear someone one of my friends in my head saying, “dude, they are just trees.” On one level that’s right. But on another level, maybe the spiritual is right in front of us and we miss it because we are too busy being entertained and not being bored. Maybe we are too busy running away from our feelings and our senses for easy pleasures. I say this without judgment. God knows, I spend too much time on my phone and watching television. But I also need to reset and be mindful of the wonders of existence. If I don’t, the days fly by without any real joy or connection. And what is life without those things?
I wrote something for Tricycle magazine! An excerpt to the beginning for you to peruse:
During a lecture, a student asked Shunryu Suzuki, the Buddhist priest who helped bring Zen to America, if he could sum up the Buddha’s teachings in a nutshell. To everyone’s surprise, Suzuki answered. “Everything changes,” he said. It was as simple as that.
On a rational level, we all know this. Seasons pass, the lush leaves of spring transform to the vibrant, dying foliage of autumn. People grow older, wither with time, and pass away. On my New York City block, a new building stretches up to the sky where an old one sat just a few years ago. All of it is a part of the flow of life. “Everything changes.” Life is impermanent.
Just a quick post, I wrote something for Mental Hellth, a newsletter about mental health and capitalism. The full version is only available to subscribers! Enjoy.
This blog can definitely veer into mystical or weird, which I hope some of you find interesting. But today I would like to focus on a practical thing you can do daily every day. I don’t know what your morning routine is like. Maybe you have children and most of your morning is filled with activity, and you don’t really have a second to breathe. Or maybe you’re a later riser, and you stumble out of bed right into the workday. That can be a taxing way to live. Living this way means to enter the day without any reflection. And before you know it, the days, months, and years pass, and you haven’t done much reflection at all about your life.
Outside the French bakery, a line snakes in a whorl toward East 7th Street. I am alone in my bedroom on the 3rd floor watching the masked patrons in backpacks and hoodies, inching forward slowly like caterpillars. The sun is bright today casting long frightening shadows on the sidewalks. The cars whizz by and honk every few seconds like a metronome. From my computer, as I type this, the virtuoso violin of Paganini reverberates. I feel a sense of peace taking this all in with my senses.
I consider the idea of gratefulness as I sit here. I feel very fortunate at this moment. I feel grateful for my senses, that I can hum along with Paganini as I write, that I can feel my fingertips hitting the keyboard in a symphony of taps, that I can see the snaking line across the street and watch the Pin Oak tree in front of my window drift from side to side at the shaking of the wind. I wonder why I can’t always feel this way.
I recently published my first piece for Tricycle magazine. To be honest, it's been nerve-wracking as hell to have it out in the world! I worked at the San Jose Mercury News right out of college and wrote mostly high school sports stories for a few years, and I remember feeling lots of anxiety when those articles were published. Having this piece out there was a different level of anxiety, mostly because the piece is so naked and vulnerable. It's hard enough to have your heart open, living with a spirit of bodhicitta moment-to-moment, day-to-day. It feels even harder to have your heart this out in the open to thousands of strangers reading your piece.
It is far from a perfect piece of writing. I haven't read the piece since it was published because strangely enough when I read things I have authored, it is hard to even believe it was I who wrote it. Buddhism has a lot to say about anatta or non-self as I've written elsewhere. It's never quite been as clear to me what non-self means in practice as in writing this piece. This piece isn't "me." It speaks to dependent origination, one of the key teachings of the Pali text. The piece was written by some version of my consciousness at a particular moment when I was dealing with certain feelings and fears. And now that moment of consciousness has passed, and the piece is no longer "me."
I read a wonderful piece in Tricycle magazine today about what a spiritual life looks like. The timing for me to read it was perfect. It’s something I’ve been trying to make sense of recently.
We are very much a doing world. Even the language of therapy is often about doing. Everyone seems to come in and say to me, “I need to work on myself,” or “I need to work on my relationships.” The sentiment is understandable. We are a self-improvement culture. Our lives are viewed linearly, our lives a constant striving for self-improvement with a beginning, middle, and end. There is much usefulness in seeing the world this way. It is goal-orientated and results-focused first and foremost. It has helped create the world around us, including the computer I type on now or the smartphone I use to answer my emails and check social media. A lot of us internalize this productive voice and hear it in the daily chatter of our thinking self and assume this is who we are.
