Books as Drugs

I woke up this morning and tried to meditate for a bit.  My mind landed on M, my ex, and shook me completely out of my meditation.  I sat on the bed with my knees pulled to my chest, leaning my back against the wall, and tried to just be present.  Spiritual teachers offer that we find perfect joy and wholeness in Being when we simply give our full and focused attention to the present moment.  Eckhart Tolle says “As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease.”  Suffice it to say I’m not there yet.

I have so many thoughts running through my head right now.  Questions, really.  Like, do I really need to try to be present, or should I just sink into my despair and loneliness and sadness?  If it’s only through deep pain and disillusionment that we find freedom, then why should I fight the pain I feel?  The fear?  The anxiety?  Why not sink into it, wallow in it, let it consume me so that I might come out on the other end enlightened?  Isn’t that what happened to Eckhart Tolle?

I’ve been reading a lot lately.  I really love books.  Love them.  I get totally engrossed in them, I eat up the concepts put forth, I admire the author’s ability to see and speak truth and to do so artfully and poetically.  But…

There’s a desperate grasping in my hunger for books, in my need to lose myself in the pages.  I realized yesterday that books are just another of my drugs, another distraction, another way to escape the present moment.  And it’s not the books that are the problem, but my voracious consumption of them.  It occurred to me that I need to put the books aside and get to living.  But, I don’t know what it means to live.  I don’t know what I should be doing instead.

I’ve often lamented my seeming laziness, my lack of motivation to do much at all.  I look at family members who fill their days pursuing hobbies and interests and I admire and envy both their interests and their active pursuit of them.   I was in Knoxville a couple months ago visiting friends and attended a pecha kucha event at which several UT Knoxville professors gave short talks on their research in the pecha kucha format.  During their talks, I was taken by the passion some of them had for, what seemed to me, the most obscure things.  For example, my former professor gave a talk on Nabokov, who’s first love was not fiction writing (Nabokov authored the book Lolita, among others) but the scientific classification of butterflies.  Nabokov was a scientist who was obsessed with butterfly genitalia as a means of classifying butterflies, believing genitalia to evolve more slowly than other body parts and therefore to offer the most accurate means to classification.  He would sketch intricately detailed drawings of different butterfly genitalia.  This is what he loved.  This was his passion.  Any my professor’s passion is studying Nabokov.  Another professor gave a talk on his passion, falconry.  Falconry.  Did you know falconry is still a thing?  It’s still huge in the Middle East, the home of falconry.  They have falconry conferences.

I thought two things about these people and their obsessive and eccentric passions:  1 – Wow, that’s weird, and 2 – I would gladly be a “weirdo” if it meant being that passionate about anything, even butterfly genitalia.  I envied them their passions.  Envied.  They get up and go to work in the morning because they want to, because they can’t wait to see what they’ll discover next.  I would give anything to feel that kind of drive, to have something I do because that’s just what I do.  Because it just is.

I don’t have that, though.  I don’t have a passion.  Or, perhaps more accurately, I haven’t discovered it yet, or maybe I discovered it long ago and ignored it and eventually forgot about it.  I do the things I do because…well…I have to do something, right?  Reading is something I do when I don’t have anything else to do, or anything else that I want to do.  But it’s also something I do to distract myself from my dissatisfaction with my own life, to escape “reality,” like a drug.  When I had this realization last night, that I use books to distract myself from life, I wondered if perhaps my problem is not that I do too little, but that I do too much – constantly finding new distractions to pull myself away from the present moment.

In talking about the setting and pursuing of external goals, Eckhart Tolle says “there may be things to be attained or acquired…[but] neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome…Everything is honored, but nothing matters [emph. mine].”  Nothing matters.  It’s not that I find that statement depressing, because I don’t.  On the contrary, it resonates deeply with me.  I’ve never found much meaning in things others find their personal identity in, such as nationalistic pride, sports fanaticism, religious affiliation, political affiliation, race/ethnicity, child rearing, or work, even in a so-called “helping” field.  But, if nothing matters, why do anything?

I know, I know, I sound like an adolescent.  Am I really still asking “why am I here?”  Shouldn’t I have moved on with living already?  I can’t help it.  It’s just where I am right now.  I’m just trying to accept it and, perhaps through accepting it, move past it.

I wish to just sit here, doing nothing, just being, until I feel my calling.  I don’t want to talk to anyone, I don’t want to do anything, I don’t want to go anywhere.  It strikes me that this is perhaps not the best approach, but I am reminded “If not here, where?  If not now, when?”  I’m just trying to accept it for what it is.  I don’t really understand myself why I’m going to Rio, and that not knowing breeds a fear in me and makes me feel like maybe I don’t want to go at all.  Another part of me thinks it will be good to have something in my life that propels me out in to the world – dance classes to go to.  But, that still feels pointless.

Tolle says the reason dare devils do what they do is because the extreme risks they take force them into the now, they can’t let their minds stray for even a moment, and that focused attention on the present moment brings exhilaration.  I think that’s why I like dancing so much.  When it’s a really good dance, I’m totally present-moment focused.  Dancing with phenomenal dancers, leads who channel the music flawlessly into their movement, my mind doesn’t even have the chance to stray.  You find yourself in a state of no-mind.  You find God in those moments.

I guess that’s why we do what we do – to find God.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call it finding “flow.”  Tolle would call it finding the now.  Others would call it simply Being or Love.  It’s not about the intended outcome, it’s simply about being absorbed in the doing.  And not just being absorbed in the doing, but being the doing.  Being.  “The dancer is the dance,” as the Buddhist saying goes.  “Work is love made visible,” says Khalil Gibran; and if it’s not, then it’s work that isn’t worth doing.  Miley Cyrus even recorded a song about it when she was still Hannah Montana – “The Climb.”

I started rereading Khalil Gibran’s “The Prophet” last night.  Khalil Gibran speaks the truth so beautifully and eloquently and poetically.  I am moved by his words and so grateful for his having shared them with the world.  I think I could spend a lifetime elaborating on each of the statements in that one little book alone, how each one has manifested in my life.  I was especially glad to have picked it up last night, just days before my own departure, and to read what the author has to say about the hero’s departing from the city of Orphalese for home – not just departing from physical locations, but from psychological attachments, as well.

Not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.  Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?  Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache…The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark.  For to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould.  Fain I would take with me all that is here.  But how shall I?  A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that give it wings.  Alone must it seek the ether.  And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.

-Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

TL;DR:  Books are my drugs.  This is my brain on books.  Awaiting my calling with impatience and anxiety.