Wise Words? Contentment and Complacency

I was driving to work with my boss and he made a comment to me that sort of stuck with me.

He told me that I "talked about death too much." It was said in response to a pretty harmless and offhand comment, I believe I iterated that someone who was driving recklessly in traffic was liable to kill someone, but it did get me thinking about death, and how death has related to my life.

I'm not sure what the regular amount of death to experience in a young person's life is but I would venture to say I feel like Ive seen a little too much. I didnt grow up in a warzone, urban or otherwise, but I did watch my dad lose both of his parents at a relatively young age for an adult (he's the youngest of 8) and I also buried a friend of my own when I was 18. All of these deaths were very sudden, especially my own friend, so even though I dont think the amount of death I saw made me paranoid or afraid of my own death to an unreasonable degree, it did make me very aware of just how quickly life could be taken away from you.

I'm reminded of something I believe Geddy Lee was said, something to the effect of being able to feel the hands of time ticking constantly.

He summed up how I felt about death better than I could have, as is often the case with Rush and I. Its not a morbid fear, but lets be honest every single day we live is in fact some form of a miracle. Getting pregnant is a miracle of nature, giving birth is the most painful experience we as humans are capable of going through (kinda well timed since Mother's day is a week away as of this writing), and raising kids is the most serious commitment you can make in your life in terms of the time effort money and love you need to put in just to have a shot at forming a human capable of standing up to life's various viscous challenges. So no matter who you are or what kind of shit other people have managed to put you through your ability to be on this planet is a gift. I dont know if anyone will ever read this but if so, your ability to do so is a gift of infinite rarity and beauty and I very much appreciate your time. I certainly am very gifted to have a life which allows me to sit down and transcribe my many varied and questionably intelligent thoughts onto a medium which has a logistical chance of being seen by a wide variety of other people. TLDR, for as much as the phrase annoyed me when it first became popular when I was in school, You Only Live Once and as such life should be cherished.

So how do we cherish life? Well in an ideal world we would do it by following our bliss. Doing what makes you happy as well as you can within your means and doing it as much as you care to before you pass on into whatever is after this very strange life. It might be something different to each person but I think each individual human has something different and weird which makes them happy. Maybe this is a controversial idea but to me its self evident. However, someone who's been a little too ground down by the wheels of global industry might say "well thats all well and good but others depend on what I do with my life. I dont have time to follow my bliss I have to work and put food on the table and a roof over my head and make the car payment and save up for the kids college but if I dont find the money to take a short vacation sometime soon Im gonna lose my marbles beat my own head in with my keyboard." I dont know how I would ever prove to a cold heart that this is a significant enough portion of the population to worry about, but Ill just say its a current Ive felt pretty pervasively throughout my life in the older people I talk to. To return to Rush once again, "once all the bones are burried there is very little time to go outside and play." The song uses the extended metaphor of a dog to examine how time often flows in a human life, and I think it works well on two levels. Working at a particular job just because you feel like you have to does make you feel like little more than an animal, fighting every day for your right to live in the world you were born into. And the effect this can often have is making you feel like theres literally time for nothing in life outside of your responsibilities. 

Now I dont want to come down on anyone who feels this way, I think in many ways this is the little box that people get pushed into by global industry in order to keep them  predictable and unlikely to cause any kind of big social upheaval which might upset the powers in place. Its a form of wall-less imprisonment where you don't have to stay in prison but the walls themselves along with all the guards and the fellow inmates tell you that theres nothing worth seeing outside the walls and that anyone who tells you differently is living a delusional fantasy. But they're all wrong. Life is in fact filled with endless possibilities twists and turns, what matters more than what we must do is how we do and what we do with the few precious moments outside of responsibility. Whether you're lucky enough to have entire days to lounge around like I do or whether that time frame is limited to just a few silent and still moments before you fall asleep each night and wake each morning, there are spaces in our life which we can fill with whatever we want. I am constantly evaluating criticizing and restructuring the way I spend this time (a clear sign I have too much of it I suppose) and when asked, the thing I say Im trying to avoid is growing complacent.

Complacency is the word I would assign to the working dog persona which I think has defined the American economy ever since capitalism became globalized. As Paul Goodman wrote about in Growing up Absurd, there is no such thing as a meaningful job in America and though that book was written in the 1950s the words ring just as true today. Even in my short time in the job market I've walked away from a job more than once because the business operated in a way which I found repulsive. Whether it was a restaurant which gouged server wages or a software company which used their user base as a quality assurance team, its been my experience that a lot of the jobs on offer in the U.S. are just that: jobs. Opportunities to work 40 hours or more a week in order to tread water. Though I am personally of the belief that a better world with better work would function and feel remarkably better than the one we live in now, I feel like for those living complacently right now waiting and wishing for new world order is not an excellent suggestion.

For an answer on how to get out of complacency now, I think we need to turn once again to Buddhism, specifically the Dali Lama. In the Book of Joy, which I know I've mentioned before, his holiness says that the ultimate source of happiness is within us. And indeed this is more or less the Buddhist perspective in a nutshell. Happiness is within us and all attachment to external ideas or pleasures will eventually cause suffering. A surface level reading of this idea might seem to suggest that all of this talk of complacency is little more than melodrama and that finding happiness is as easy as wanting to find it. No real Buddhist would suggest that the finding of true inner happiness is easy, but there's a way to understand this quote without staying in the confines of the particular Buddhist religion.  

Laying down and accepting the beatings of life as they come is certainly no way to live. But if we can find a way to discover joy however it might be present in our life, whether its making time for a favorite activity, investing more time into the relationships we truly treasure, or totally changing your life around to peruse something which won't make you feel like a working dog all the time, life will seem longer and more meaningful. For me the key has been spending more time on music and even a little time on some silly little writing projects, for you it will almost certainly be something slightly different than that. I call this middle ground between lying down and dying and waiting for the world to give us our lives back the search for contentment. And even though it may feel like joy and happiness is totally out of reach for some people, I know for anyone who could possibly take the time to read something like this be it out of a personal favor for me or just because you somehow care about this stuff, its within reach.

Stay happy,

Sam