Day of Feeling 16

As I sit down to write, the biggest thing in my mind is a sense of frustration at the weight that I am gaining. I see exactly how my dinner tonight contributed to that: too much soba, one too many ice-cream sandwiches. One too many croissanwiches at lunch. Breakfast was ok. I can always keep things within reason first thing in the morning.

I feel so justified in eating these treats - how can I possibly argue against it? What are the exact reasons I want to moderate my eating and lose weight?

I think they are mainly vain reasons. I am not, in fact, honestly out to take care of my body.

This touches the shadow-talk I went into yesterday.

I think one definition of good self-esteem is a marked lack or reduction of conflict with your shadow. You identify with and sympathize with the parts of yourself you had to choose to reject. I, and most people, I think, tend to struggle a bit.

One thing to note is that I don't feel like I had any choice. That I always had to be divided. This is of course a major issue when it comes to my feelings. I never feel like I have any choice, and therefore little responsibility. Or the choice seems so murkily indirect and complicated I feel I might as well have no choice. I just want to avoid the whole issue.

I had two interesting and compelling moments of good, solid anger while I was out walking at various times today.

The first was thinking both about myself and my clients. I felt that the biggest problem people face is not taking responsibility for enjoying their lives. They want life to be enjoyable spontaneously and without any effort on their part. When they meet with disappointment, they try to compensate. They go to drugs or food or just laziness and avoidance. Anything to get away from boring reality. This first of all wears people out; it costs good feeling to be always criticizing the world around you. Second, it saps motivation. Why work and get a job and have a family and do right if the sum total of enjoyment is mostly going to stay the same?

The society in which we find ourselves deals with this issue poorly. They say you will be happy when you have a house and money and a spouse and children. But it is not automatically so. These things are just the trappings of a rich life of self-respect and true belonging to community. If you get all those things without either the internal belonging or the community, you will still feel empty and back to the bottle and the streets you go. Of course, not everyone ends up on the streets or in detox, but it's all increments on the same ruler.

The issue, then, is that it is hard to touch that real center of lack, of self-hatred, of frustration and confusion. It's almost completely untouchable. I see all kinds of people in therapy, including myself, and I watch them and myself, and deep down I think we're all really, really hurting in a serious way. I don't mean to ham up the victim stance; I think this is an objective fact, a phenomenon that can be observed in the way that people interact with the world and the way they reveal how they feel about themselves.

Deep down, everyone is desperately wondering, why? Why should I do anything? Why should I try? This is what I'm wondering.

You are meant to feel good; you are clearly not meant to be a collection or receptacle of good feelings. To collect these experiences, in terms of real healing, is almost worth as much as not having them at all. They have value in themselves, of course, but they can't change the core, they don't reach deep enough.

If I step back, I can see that the chief culprit here is the belief that something is going to come along and give you a reason to live. There is nothing in the universe that can do that for you. And to the extent that any reason to live that you come up with is still something to rely on for wanting to live, there is no reason to live. I think you have to live with that; I think once you enter a world in which there is meaninglessness, you can never go back again. Meaninglessness is that character they added in the 9th season of your favorite show that just kind of spoils the whole thing, but it's too late. Meaninglessness is an eternal jumping of the shark.

It's frightening, because I think Meaninglessness leads to Stillness and nowhere else. Once you've found Meaninglessness, you can't ever really go back to the Midway and the Fireworks; at least not until you go through Stillness. You have to go to Stillness, and you have to master it and summon up what is inside you to master it. That's a shitload of work.

So how am I going to begin losing weight, for real? Stillness. How will I choose a career? Stillness. My career will be Stillness and my hobbies will be Stillness.

Makes it seem like I should just get on with it already and join a Zen monastery, right?

Makes me want to get on with my evening zazen.

On that note,

Good Night.