Photo by Pari Aryafar
Here’s something you need to know about me
I am intolerant of stagnation. Stagnation, to me, is synonymous with living a life unexplored. Stagnation is what I experienced when I refused to be courageous, refused to be outspoken, refused to stand up for myself or stand before a grand jury of judgement on behalf of my beliefs. When you sit down in the comfy couch cushions of your life, turn on the radio, and zone out to the mellow sounds, you feel at peace. You feel at home. You feel untouchable and right as rain and like the richest king in the world. But the universal truth we all experience is that things do not last forever. Everything reaches an expiration date, the milk sours, the leaves fall off the trees, the skin sags and the cells slowly shrivel and die. The couch cushion eventually leaves your lower back feeling stiff and aching. The radio seems to drone on and on with the same beats and the same tremors in the singer’s voice. Your feet, which had been so gleefully put up to rest now plead to move from atrophy. And some of us choose to stay there. We choose to stay sprawled out on that couch because geez, at one point it felt like the greatest feeling in the world and we want that feeling to return. We want to repeat the process. Sitting down, turning the dial, hearing the music, leaning back. But it’s not the same. It’s the second sip of water after parched days of wandering the desert. It tastes good, but it never tastes of freedom again.
I don’t want to sit on the couch anymore. As the late Anthony Bourdain said “I understand there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy. Without new ideas success can become stale.” Anthony Bourdain committed suicide. Even with his vast understanding, he was not without his flaws of knowing the self. Perhaps his burden to bear was one of over-work, one of trying too hard to get to someplace, reaching too high for the stars, knowing well enough that you would never hope to graze that space dust with your fingertips. And well that’s fine, that was his road to bear, and I understand and respect his choices with my whole being, and I believe to understand the choices of everyone in this world and accept them too. But I also reserve the right to move along the pathway that I’ve been so delicately and integrally selected for.
And what we come back to is this idea of balance. That we can neither completely attach, nor detach. That a sober life is just as valuable or invaluable as the life of a hedon. That all the sex in the world won’t kill your loneliness, and all the meditation in the caves of a temple far far away won’t get you any closer to touching consciousness, or exerting complete control. We are all here alive and well. We should be grateful, we should be loving of this existence and experience. But love does not exist on a plane of oneness. It is not absolute, and as all things it is catalyzed from duality. It is a reflection of the great dance of light and dark. A tool to help us feel secure when we are lost, and a kick up the ass when we think of ourselves as having it all figured out. Love is fluid and immeasurable and takes all forms and not all of them are happy, or sweet, or present or compassionate. Some of them are knife-wielding and sound like piercing screams in the night. Some of them are somber, painted in blue, dragging like the tattered edges of the train of a wedding dress. Some of them are stale, idle, unmoving. All of them are pure forms and all of them are welcome.
As my friend Michael J Parker alluded, we can choose to see the flowers in the garden or we can choose to focus on the weeds. Regardless of our choice, there will still be weeds in the garden, and there will also still be flowers. The true power lies in looking at the weeds and embracing them in the same way we do the flowers. In this way that makes no excuses, nor turns it’s nose up to things that seem lesser than or not enough. In this way that is truly all-encompassing and all-opening. There is no greater feeling than the one that opens your heart up when you stare in the mirror at the blemishes and the craters and crevices in your skin, and gaze at them all fondly. Taking in the small and the big, all at once, and allowing it all to permeate without quandary and judgment.
And where stagnation lives, is in between the folds of the linens and the lines of the sentences in the books. It lives so secretly and with such subtlety that we rarely notice it creeping into our lives, making a home for itself in our worlds and in our bodies and in our minds. We find ourselves walking, and breathing, and thinking about what lies ahead, but each thought seems to have an anchor attached to it that slows its gentle rendition. And as we drag that anchor more and more and for longer periods of time, it becomes more entrenched in the dirt, and the thoughts arise less prominently and we move with less gusto. We go through the motions because we know the routine, and we like the routine because at some point, it was the newborn baby that we cradled in our arms and gazed at for the very first time. And instead of challenging ourselves, instead of digging that anchor out of the ground and using a sturdy bolt cutter to cut through the chain, we let ourselves say that this is our lot in life and that’s all right and that’s okay.
It is okay. But this piece of writing is being written by me. And I am not okay. I am not accepting of stagnation. I am not singing its praises and I am not interested in having a relationship with it for eternity. That’s not to say I don’t respect it. I respect the rest, the boredom, the points in life where you know what you must do no matter how badly you can’t bring yourself to do it. The laziness and procrastination all bear importance in my world and all have pedestals in the glass case that holds my trophies. But I refuse to live my life in it’s accordance, because as I have already married myself to my art, at this present moment, I have also married myself to my growth. And this is a lifelong commitment I refuse to sever, until my dying breath and beyond.