Toward Savoring the Experience of Life
Desires
Like beautiful bodies of the dead, who had not grown old
and they shut them with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet –
that is how desires look that have passed
without fulfillment; without one of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a moonlit morn.
–Constantine P. Cavafy
“Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” –Rumi
“The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.” –Norman Peale
Unfortunately, this has been true for me of late. At work, I recently received some clear messages that I needed to buckle down and create a fundraising work plan to help us through a tough economic climate. (It’s rough out there for us nonprofits, let me tell you.)
And while I’m down with planning, the thought that I needed to do my work in a significantly different way…let’s just say it didn’t sit well with me at first. But enough time has passed that I realize the merit of the feedback I’d been given.
It’s come down to swallowing my pride and realizing that I don’t have all of the answers all of the time. So, while I think I’m still a pretty good nonprofit manager, it doesn’t mean that I can’t be better still.
The Norman Peale quote above really helped crystallize things for me.
My Aunt Shelley recently exclaimed on Facebook, “Today I have achieved 30 consecutive days of NOT turning on the TV, or reading a book, while I eat.”
Her post sort of startled me, as I struggled to remember the last time I simply ate a meal without some sort of book or device in front of me. Of course, there are meals where I socialize. But barring that, the majority of the time I’m distracted by something, which means that I’m not really paying attention to my food or the experience of eating.
Inspired by Shelley, I’ve had two meals in the last few days where I simply ate. The first time, what stood out was the temperature of the food, bites that were warm and savory or the delicious coolness of my drink.
Tonight was my second attempt. What came across this time were textures, the way my teeth slowly sunk into a bit of avocado, the pleasingly coarse feel of bread against my tongue, or the chewiness of the wild rice in my stew.
But something else happened as well. I slowed down, and I felt much more full at the end of the meal. How easy it is to get caught up in the daily grind and to seek distraction at every moment. My heartfelt thanks to Aunt Shelley for giving me another mindfulness tool for the toolkit!
“Sex-negative messages don’t keep people from having sex. They keep people from having good sex. They keep people from having pride in their sexuality, from sexual self-awareness. They keep people from asking questions about sex, and communicating with their partners. They discourage experimentation. They blur the lines between consensual sex and rape by framing all sex as an undifferentiated mass of ‘bad.’”
–From “Sex-Negative Education and the Spectre of Rape“
Love this.
“The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.”
Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
From “The Joy of Quiet“
“I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That is my religion, and every day I am sorely, grossly, heinously and deeply offended, wounded, mortified and injured by a thousand different blasphemies against it. When the fundamental canons of truth, honesty, compassion and decency are hourly assaulted by fatuous bishops, pompous, illiberal and ignorant priests, politicians and prelates, sanctimonious censors, self-appointed moralists and busy-bodies, what recourse of ancient laws have I? None whatever. Nor would I ask for any. For unlike these blistering imbeciles my belief in my religion is strong and I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.”
–Stephen Fry
The spider he is confused
b/c I am not killing him
only moving him outdoors
When I die I do not want
to feel confused
Please I would rather feel clarity
like I am a pool
and death a chlorine tablet
I want it to feel
not like I am dying
but am being transferred
to the outside
And I hope I do not drown
as I have seen happen
to hundreds of spiders
b/c I love to swim
and to drown would
wreck swimming
for a long time
But death is like none of this
I know that death is a tower
standing in the middle of the town
And the tower receives
many visits
And there’s no one
but spiders inside
“People sometimes ask me, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.
Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.”
| — | Derrick Jensen |
