A LUCILIUS PARABLE: IMMORTAL COLORS

May 26th, 2019

Lucilius watched as his steps disappeared in the sand of a strange and foreign shore.  Water rushed up the slope of sand in gentle sheets brimming edges of white bubbles.  He walked along, looking out at the copper horizon, a sun of hot iron warping in the low sky.  He pushed his satchel back further behind him as he strode from the water’s reach.  He was an old man now, and as he reflected on the ever-fresh light of a dying sunset, he noticed a girl sitting in the distance, her face in her hands, the bent arc of her back trembling.

Lucilius walked up to the girl and looked the way of the sunset.  “I suppose it must be death, heartbreak, or you’re just a sucker for sunsets.”

The girl looked up at him, confused, her face streaked with tear.  Lucilius’ smile faded looking at the girl.

“heartbreak, isn’t it?”  he said.

The girl nodded, her face further clouded with suspicion and the welcome relief of company.  Lucilius slowly took a knee on his old bones and then sat down.

“fresh?”  Lucilius asked.

“A week ago,” the girl murmured as she sniffed and wiped her face.

“A week?” Lucilius questioned.

The girl’s eyes welled up once more.  “It’s just become so mean.”  She looked away, her face distorting to hold back against the push of feeling.

Lucilius nodded.  “Strange how we become so quick to poison the memory others have of us.”

The thought calmed the girl and she looked at Lucilius.

“Who are you?”

“Oh, just an old man, no one anymore, at least not to anyone I’ve known.”

A corner of the girl’s mouth pulled down at his response.  She sniffled again, watching him look out at the sunset.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

Lucilius glanced at her. 

“Hmm.  A story.”  He looked at her again, judging her face a moment.  “When I was about your age, I found myself in love, but it didn’t work out.  She took to a friend, my very best at the time, and the whole of it left me so bitter, I just took off without knowing any direction, not caring, just going.  I walked out of my home town and into the country, and when night gathered, a storm came with it.  I was soaking wet by the time I came across a big barn, and by that time I was so tired out from my own hurt and bitterness, I broke my way into the barn and fell asleep away from the storm.

The next morning, I woke up with a cup of coffee sitting in front of my face.  I sat up and there was an old woman standing at a table.  The barn had no animals, it was a studio, filled with paintings of flowers and from the ceiling hung thousands of dried flowers.

The old woman noticed me when I woke and called me over.  ‘come here boy,’ she said.  I was somewhat dazed, the memory of how bitter I was still hadn’t hit me and I took my coffee and went to the old woman.

She had more flowers arranged on the table with a big book open.  She handed me two slabs of wood that were bolted at the corners and told me to undo them.  Said she could get them tight, but said it hurt to get them loose herself.

So I loosened the bolts for the old woman and she took the wooden slabs apart and between them a flower had been pressed into paper, it was flat as the paper but as bright as if it had never been picked.  She took it with a smile and fitted it into her book.

I ended up staying with the old woman a month, helping her with her flowers.  She’d had a husband who did the paintings but he was passed by the time I found my way into the barn.  She never asked me any questions, just told me what to do, and each day we sat down and worked together, pressing flowers.  She knew the names of all of them, had a whole library filled with them, and then one day when we’d been working with the flowers for weeks, I asked her why.

‘Out there,’ she said, nodding to the open door of the barn ‘they rot and, turn ugly, make food for other things.’  Then she glanced up at the ceiling of the barn where all the dried flowers hung.  ‘Up there they stay, but they lose all their color.’  Then as she gently pressed a fresh flower with her wooden slabs, she said ‘but in here, they stay bright forever.

It takes work – a little work, but it’s worth it to hold on to the colors a little longer, so they can be appreciated days down the line, as though they’d just opened up.  Flowers are like memories in that way.  They’ll rot if you’re not careful.”

Lucilius pulled his satchel from behind him and unlatched the flap, and took from inside it a small old book.  He handed it to the girl and she took it with curious hands.

Lucilius slowly raised himself to his feet.  He looked down at the girl.  “I think that ought be yours now,” and with that he nodded at the girl and then continued on his way.

The girl opened the book and it was filled with flowers, still vibrant and sharp.  She carefully turned the pages.   And eventually she found, inside the back cover, in the old woman’s fine penmanship:

If I were to be drawn into a battle I lose, by friend or lover or foe; none,

not even my greatest enemy nor greatest love could spoil the memories I have of defeat.

PRESSURE COOKER PATIENCE

May 25th, 2019

Patience should not be keeping it all in.  True patience is simply letting go of steam before it builds up, by removing one’s self from such a tight identification with the emotion.  If we do not identify with it, how can it influence our behavior?  I don’t identify as a four legged animal, so the notion of touching the ground with four limbs as I walk around has no influence on the way I walk around.  This may seem like a far-fetched analogy, but this is intended, if we become far-fetched from our own anger, then it becomes somewhat absurd to act upon it.  This seems to have a contradiction in it: how can we be removed from something that is ‘our own’. 

Possession is a detrimental way to think of this.

Do you own anger?  Or is it merely a common experience that visits you from time to time at intervals and during occasions that are quite similar to most other people?

When you have a cold, is it really.. your cold? 

or

Are you being visited by some biological cocktail that snuck it’s way into your body’s systems?  The constituents of that little bug existed before it came into contact with you, and while your body might kill it off and it may cease to exist after meeting your immune system, it’s at no point entirely sensical to claim it as an identity.  This is somewhat like claiming an identity relative to Lucky Charms while eating the cereal.

And food is another good example which populates the spectrum a little more.

We need only witness one person at the dinner table invading someone else’s plate with a fork and snagging some food.  Many people experiencing such an invasion would not be happy and give the other person a sour look, if not worse.

There’s the sense that food on my plate is my food. 

But again, like the monkey pressing buttons for food in the previous episode, anything we eat is very transitory.  It has a fleeting effect on our body and mind, like ripples when a stone is dropped in water.

Is anger or sickness, not often the exact same thing?

These experiences warp and skew our conscious experience for a time and then slowly the intensity of their influence resigns.

Seeing the similarity between all these ways that reality can poke our conscious experience, can ultimately empower a person to begin toying with the degree and manner in which their consciousness changes as a result of getting poked by these different phenomena.

This is potentially a fair definition of what it means to be mindful, in the meditative sense.

The flip of this would be something like experienceful, where one’s mind is so engrossed and intoxicated with what’s going on that there’s no room left for the actual mind.  A phrase that perhaps captures this sentiment is being lost in the moment.  We do not really think when we are lost in the moment, as often happens during encounters with extreme anger.

Patience, should not be a battle with anger, though this is what is often feels like for many people.  Trying to deal with anger in such a way is like arguing with a fool, which only turns one’s self into a likewise fool.   Engaging in battle with anger is in essence a battle automatically lost.  Doing so is entertaining the experience of anger, welcoming it to leak in and pollute, the mere instance making the mind more and more hospitable to anger.  In essence the emotion feeds off of our willingness to engage with it.  Trying to maintain patience while entertaining anger is akin to turning the heat on a pressure cooking.  No matter how good the construction, all pressure cookers will fail given enough heat.

A mindful approach to anger is to stroll out on to the field where anger hopes to do battle and set down a beach towel to lie upon in order to enjoy the view.  There is no need to fear any display of might and arms that anger might wheel up, all of it is a smokescreen that only becomes real if a person decides to identify as those things.  Such armaments cannot then be used upon the anger which gifted us such weapons.  The gifts of anger can only be used on the people and circumstances of our life, which does about as much good as handing a loved one a pressure-cooker just moments before it explodes.

This episode references Episode 250: Language, Episode 17: The Identity Danger, and Episode 18: Fluid Identity

SUBTLE REWARD

May 24th, 2019

When the monkey presses the right sequence of buttons, the monkey gets a tasty treat.  It would be easy and wrong to label the tasty treat as the reward in this little experiment. 

The tasty treat is an ephemeral aspect of the situation, one that is quickly digested and dissolved by it’s nutritional value.  The tasty treat is gone almost as fast as it arrived, and yet there is a reward that lingers beyond the nutritional flicker of the tasty treat.

The true reward for the monkey is understanding the cause and effect relationship between the buttons available to push and the hunger the monkey feels.  A specific code of behavior stitches them together, allowing a systematic behavior to effectively address the hunger.

The reward is the conceptual theory learned that can be applied again when the issue of hunger arrives.

We can take a different sort of monkey and replace the tasty treat with something a little more subtle:  Let’s say the situation is a grown adult in the middle of a tense and difficult conversation with a loved one.  The tasty treat that is poised to be grasped at the end of this engagement is a calm resolution instead of a worse situation that balloons to take up more time and exhaust more energy and emotion.  The ‘sequence of buttons’ here most likely has something to do with an exercise of patience.  If our adult manages to glide through the interaction without letting anger overwhelm their words and behavior, then the tasty treat is a better outcome, one that does not need to be cleaned up.

The real reward here is discovering a method of behavior that doesn’t make life worse.  Whereas the tasty treat arguably makes life better, the reward here is not dealing with a life that has been made worse.  The reward is not necessarily a net-positive in this case, but one that keeps life a net-even, so to speak. 

Though, beyond this net even, there is still the reward of discovering a method and system of behavior that keeps things from getting worse.  What superficially seems like a situation that results in no positive or negative ultimately has a positive influence on our life because we preserve the resources and time of our current situation, allowing such time and resources to then be devoted to other puzzles that result in overtly positive outcomes as opposed to spending that time and resource cleaning up from unmitigated disasters.

By adding these systems of behavior together that simultaneously preserve the good we have amounted in life, safeguarding that life from devolving and add to the good of our life, we create compounding virtuous cycles that inevitably allow us to Level-Up.

This episode references Episode 42: Level-Up and Episode 386: White Diamond

BIG QUESTION BAD QUESTION

May 23rd, 2019

Many of the biggest questions that we come across, that we tend to think are the most important, are in all truth, very poor questions.

What is the meaning of life?

That’s perhaps the biggest question we have, and yet, it’s a terrible question; first and foremost because it never leads a person to a definitively better place.  Attempting to answer this question is akin to a rut.  One can wonder and perseverate in circles forever without ever really gaining any ground.

What to do with life? is similarly a poor question because of how large and ungainly it is.

We can ask what a better question might be?

How can we zoom this question in and carve a more productive version out of it?

We can narrow the time scope for one and ask merely: what shall we do with today?

No matter what the answer ultimately turns out to be for our larger question about life, it is invariably tied to the actions we take now, how those actions are wrapped up in current obligations and how exactly we use our time outside of such obligations to steer in new directions.

Generally, the bigger the question, the more likely the question is a poor one.  There’s a simple reason for this:  we do best to ask questions that are in direct proportion to our own personal agency.  Asking questions about things that we cannot really do anything about is not only paralyzing, but the mismatch is more likely to cause stress that we cannot resolve than it is likely to produce any kind of meaningful result that we can work with.

Its for this relation to personal agency that we do best to refashion questions like whittling knives and trim the fat off questions that are not in accord with our current powers.

Such larger questions are not without their utility, but only if we can bridge a way for our current level of agency to one day increase to the point where such questions are not simply stressors.  Questions about time help illustrate this.  After answering what we will do with today, we can then ask about the week, and the succeeding weeks, then the month and future months, and slowly, if we are thorough and honest with our answers we begin to bridge the agency of a single life in a single day to much larger frames of time.  If our efforts in those succeeding scales of time are directed in ways that increase our personal agency, then the sorts of questions we can handle grow bigger in accordance to that personal agency.

Regardless, however, starting with an honest assessment of where we currently stand is the most important part of all of this.  Without working with the only power we have and leveraging it as well as possible, no larger aims are possible.

Such agency boils down to a much simpler question:

What can you do today with what you’ve got now?

FIENDS FOR FEELING

May 22nd, 2019

Sometimes things are too tense, too dark, too dreary.

Often things are simply too something. Too, too.  As in quadruple O’s.

We’re fiends for feeling.  That’s the stuff of life, to feel it, to drink deep of what it’s got to give.   We can be pretty mindless about this greedy, scrooging when it comes to what we feel.  So mindless in fact that many of us accidentally tap a deep vein of some dark feeling and we are all too willing to stick an oil-company-sized straw down into that pit of despair and slurp that poison into our minds.

Yet it’s from our own minds we tap this infinite well of despair.  Our imagination, in this respect is thrown on the hamster-wheel, and put to work, to churn out more dreary landscapes of the mind for our fiendish hunger for feeling to frolic through.

Rarely are our circumstances actually so bad as to equal the magnitude of what we can imagine.  This is why scary movies hold back a full look at the monster for so long.   Those movies bank on the power of imagination which always comes up with something far more terrifying, and individually tailored for everyone in the audience.

All these feelings are a bit like colors of a painter’s pallet.  Mix them all together and you’re bound to get something rather muddy and undifferentiated.

The imagination is a kind of everything machine in the same way a disco ball is.  Toss it in any direction and it’ll print out something reminiscent of that direction.  Toss it down into a pit of despair and it’ll multiply, magnify and reflect back a million times that pit of despair.

On the other hand, that disco ball down there can be like a Ghostbuster trap.  Shine a light of humor down at that discoball and it’ll split a joke a million ways and light up a pit of despair.

Like sunshine on mold, if only we be so bold and disrespect some dark and brooding emotion with a joke, a smile, an incongruous laugh, that emotion can wither pathetic in light of the new situation.

Reach for anything, a fart joke, a penis joke.  Who cares when things are bad.

Think of a cancer patient.

Oh, did this just get dark?

Ok, think of a cancer patient who is constantly making fun of their own situation.

Family and friends walk into a hospital room, their eyes welling up with tears, flowers quivering in trembling hands, fears about saying the wrong thing clamping their tongues, and then they are greeted.

“Guys, check out this baller haircut they gave me!  I look like Donald Trump being hit with the full force of climate change!”

Let’s say no one laughs.

So cancer patient tries again.

“Aw geez, can’t I even get a pity laugh?  I mean I’m actually dying here.”

Funny how we say that when we laugh really hard.  “I’m dying!”

Actually that’s what the word ‘hilarious’ is supposed to mean.  It’s when something is so funny you die from it.

As long as we don’t actually know the person, of course.  Because that would be sad.

But hey, since we’re such fiends for feeling, let’s tack on anything that spikes an emotional response, right?

That’s what we’re all after anyways.

No need to pause and think calmly about things while practicing to maintain a sense of equanimity, right? 

That’s for Buddha’s and Jedi’s, and Robert Mueller. 

So let’s get back to our cancer patient for a second.  The commercial break ends and we see the family and friends leaving the room, smiles and tears being wiped away.

Surely we’re bound to hear something like “So sad, but at least they’re keeping up a good sense of humor about everything.”

Cancer patient will inevitably call out boisterously, realizing how much social freedom their new situation gives them.

“No crying you wimps!  And remember when I’m dead, I want to be propped up in the corner of a bar where you’ll all be getting hammered, and you have to do what I say cause I’m dying, like James Bond laughing at the end of Casino Royale while getting nailed in the balls by fate.” 

Cancer patient then starts to laugh at their own joke.

“Get it?  I’m dying?”