Monthly Archives: October 2022

Sannyasa: The Fourth Chapter of Life

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Awareness of the movements, chapters, seasons, and acts of life are distinctly different when viewed from a distance of age.

The contained existence in my childhood through grade school to high school was controlled, enforced, and structured. Those who lived before me had stories, egregores, and trauma-marked cells that surfaced in my own biological blueprint. That era, the abraiding of intersecting cultures wearing away to a single smooth surface of belief, I see as almost cult-like. We believed what we were taught to believe.

at 4 years old

My arrival on the earth was the year that WW II ceased. I shot out into a time of rabid hunger for growth. The depression reduced choices for my grandparents and in the childhood of my own parents. But NOW we were like the starving crowds let loose in a field of food. The norm was for us to gorge ourselves.

We paid close attention to what our neighbors had newly purchased. The fins on our cars grew to sci-fi proportions. We were propelled into competitive hedonism. My father bought the first TV set in our neighborhood. There was a cache´, an undisputable sense of status that a family could achieve instantaneously.

One could move ahead of the pack. One could be the house that people pointed to as they drove past. The Thunderbird in the driveway; the TV antenna reaching out beyond the roof to outer space; the books lining the bookshelf on hypnosis, self-improvement, some with bright pictures of modernist houses insistently and rebelliously sleek; the lounge chair covered in orange fabric in the living room that was impossible to sit upon no matter how one contorted the body, all signaled patriotic dedication to consumerism.

And so as I moved through my life, I watched the carefully cultivating craving. If only…. if only I could get good grades. If only I could graduate from university. If only I could earn a master’s. If only I could find a husband, a house, and have children. Always, always moving toward a goal whose dopamine hit of pleasure disappeared as soon as it was achieved. It was decades of crawling through the sand to arrive at a mirage.

I watched as the cultural imprint caused people to balloon from an average size of 6 to size 16. I watched as the slavish pursuit of power, pleasure, and fame became currency.

what did I buy?

Today, our striving for clout on social media is like showing a membership card to an exclusive club. I am acceptable to myself because I have masses of friends, masses of followers, a new dress, and a new achievement. But I also watch as the fleeting moments of the new sign of personal value fade away. It is like having an entry card to a club that disappears in the hand. It was once in my grasp. But now it is gone. That sense of being special so we can be considered normal haunts us.

I worked 70 to 80-hour weeks for decades in the hopes that I could be recognized as a valid human being. It was a caucus race as in Alice in Wonderland. Quickly run to nowhere so you can stay in place. This was my period in life when I was in hot pursuit.

But now, now I am in Sannyasa. In Hindu lore, this is the period of time past 70.

Everything and nothing

In Eastern society, it is believed that everything is already in existence. Art is already complete and it is only up to the artist to remove the unnecessary. And that is the explanation for this time of life.

We grow weary of the accumulation; the caucus race; the unfocused blind pursuit of goals that do not serve our souls. Instead of a list to accomplish, we now have the wisdom to discard the unrolling scroll of itemized effort in the day. It becomes easier to say, “Does this decision, this effort, or this action make me a better person?”

We are now able to discard the trivial as unsatisfying. The imprinting of my culture, because of when I was born was to run on a track of acquisition of things, of pleasures, of status bijoux objects.

And now, in this last stage of life, it is easier for us to understand ourselves. We no longer pay attention to what the culture requires of us. We drive through the images, the ideas, and the demands like a car plows through the rain. The water just rolls off. And we begin to divest ourselves of all the burdens that we were told were treasures to be held close. We free ourselves.

We understand that an accomplishment can be just to sit in the now and feel the wind passing over us. We watch the clouds so carefully that we can see they are moving.

We are doing something. We are learning to control the mind. We are learning to be inner-focused, to be at peace, and to keep our flame of compassion for others alight. We are finally beginning to understand our purpose. It is the time for that.

Oh What Fragile Beasts We Humans Be

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The illusion of toughness gets in the way of self-care. I often think of how my understanding of my “margin for error” has just been insanely optimistic. At 78 years of age, I have learned that we never know what is spilled milk and what is an irretrievable error.

self

learning the self

The car passing on ice cutting off a semi flips and only through the skill and intent of the professional driver do we survive spinnimg around, smashing multiple times into the guard rail, and sitting finally still and shocked in the totaled car. How many times previously had the driver next to me made that move with impunity? But this time could have been ‘the exit.’

The last straw, the last exit from disaster, the minor blithe ignorance of the howling voices of the carnivorous wolves in the forest is something we simply don’t understand. We are so disconnected from our mortality that we are like children.

My family narrative was that we were tough. My father and mother could take countless risks with their lives and their children’s lives because we were of sturdy stock. Two times I had pneumonia and because we were inordinately stoic, I was left at home with a tray of soup after getting a penicillin shot.

The message was: “Don’t be a wimp.”

My mother was enfeebled by double pneumonia when I was 14 and refused to be admitted to hospital. I was kept home to keep her alive. Even though she worked in a hospital, or simply because she served as a nurse in the hospital, she distrusted the germ-infested atmosphere.

And so we were praised for not crying; taking our shots without holding a breath; enduring small bone fractures without medical care and our very strength in never asking for help was a badge to be worn proudly.

But it was worn inside the clothing next to the heart. One never bragged about being a stalwart and resolute soul. That would be a sign of weakness.

For most of my life, I have been like a driver who has been given a new car. It is fancy and technologically complex and I have never been sure how to read the gauges.

I soldiered on through pneumonia without an adult in attendance. I healed angrily inflicted bruises quietly under clothing. I went to work every day for five years with bowel cancer that was undetected. I did not know how to advocate for myself and so I assumed the exhaustion was my mistake and I was unable to ask for tests from my doctor.

My learning has been slow and sloppy. My ego was puffed up and gruff when I saw other people whining on about hunger or cold, or disappointments. I was taught our family was superior. We did not need to be babied.

The family egregore was built around me like a walled castle. We were special because we were not special.

I remember as a teenager reading about a man who lost his legs in an explosion and crawled for an hour to help. I thought to myself, “I could do that.” I was 15.

The years have taught me to fall in love with my body as if it was my baby. If the body is hungry, I feed it. If my body is tired, I lay down. If my body is in pain, I cry out and ask for help. It has taken me decades to leave behind the ancestral trauma that made our family members feel ‘special’ because we lacked empathy for ourselves.

tough people

And always, always, always I talk lovingly to my body now. I thank it for warning me when I have drawn the last straw. The body knows far more than my mind can ever understand. It knows far more than my subconscious, my ego can ever know. It knows how to survive and thrive.

I am growing into myself, at last.

 

Transitions Are Constant

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In Western culture we are not taught to see transitions. Or if we do see them we are taught to fear them. Our fragility spiritually is magnificent and stunning. It keeps us adolescent, dependent and irresponsible.

One way we are shown our error in judgement is our agape, stunned surprise when the world does not roll down the bowling alley lane like an expertly thrown ball. Control, we are told, will stave off disaster. We still have not made peace with mortality and it makes us half blind.

Control will protect us

As I watch thousands of homes swept away by the clearly, repeatedly, scientifically predicted vulnerability of coast lines, I see how the Western mind seeks shelter. “If we only had better tornado insurance, or earthquake insurance, this loss would not be happening.”

A gigantic yacht tied to a now shattered pier is reported to have been swept inland. It destroyed small nestled homes.The destruction is impressive on so many levels. As those who have lived in cabins for decades and have learned how to endure the predictable chaos of clinging to a shore line have their homes erased, I picture the reaction to a violent intersection of these two worlds.

If only there were insurance for the damage that climate catastrophe is expending on the earth, then all would be well. ‘Somebody’ is supposed to protect us from our own bad decisions.

But the contemporary world is taking the protecting wrapping away from those who believe that there is a way out of mortality. COVID showed up and no matter how expertly the political leaders spun the narrative, we all began to see that if one is vulnerable then all are vulnerable.

Fragile people

I liken it to Voodoo… it is that primitive. We will make a chalk line around ourselves, our families, our cities, our race, our social purchase place and then we are not vulnerable to the vicissitudes of morality.

I remember watching a special about a rural Canadian community that offered no jobs for those who were growing up in the village. They developed a tradition of buying a lovely new suitcase for the high school graduate (usually male) and put the person along the road to flag down the Greyhound bus. It was time to grow up. This was the initiation ceremony.

The show impressed upon me the idea of a group of people realizing that they could not deny conditions. The protected child now had to take responsibility for the future.

In some ways, I think we are like that now. We can dither and cluck around like frightened poultry. Or we can decide it is time to make the difficult choices.

A person interviewing others who have gone through war, famine, plagues, the depression, a carpet bombing of their town or village always comes away understanding that the human condition is not one of weakness. The goal is not to extend adolescence past the 40’s or 50’s. And inevitably a sense of altruism grows in these conditions. What happens to one, happens to all.

And perhaps it is the time for learning from those who trust the universe enough to find the strength to endure the inevitable “slings and arrows.” Perhaps it is time to realize that each individual person is strong and capable of growing up enough to take responsibility for his or her own decisions. Perhaps it is the time to realize that we can change the way we live with one another so we understand how fragile we all are. We need one another in order to survive. What happens to one, can happen to all. It is called mortality.

We are one