My mood has not been robust of late. The length of my sleep poor. One does what one does to keep going, but when enthusiasm and energy is lacking, it can be hard. Like slogging up a mountain with no sense of whether it will be peaceful or yet another skirmish all the way to the top. I'm at an age now when the future begins to develop a tentative quality. The question mark of how long my presence will endure hangs over it. One beautiful bright morning my bedroom mirror will find itself alone.
How many more times? How many more times do I get to be me? Is it decades, years, weeks, days, hours, seconds, how much more of all these moments bundled together to make up a life do I have? What is there time for? What is whatever the time remaining to be for? Some projects certainly may never be started now, excessive amounts of drive to push, pioneer or strive are rare qualities to mine these days. Whether things get completed, comes with the option of a shrug.
The project of ones spiritual life, if indeed it should ever be seen as such, remains never ending while there is one corpuscle left alive. Your judgements do not leave you alone, pointing out short comings and blind vanities. Sometimes I doubt, I really do. What does all this effort serve? Is this just my ego wanking for enlightenment? And I pause, no answer surfaces or suffices, and then I carry on walking, shamefaced.
I tell myself I don't need to be labelled. I say I'm a Buddhist. Its a thirty year positive habit. I stopped consciously thinking about whether Buddhist fittingly describes the current state of my beliefs a long while ago. Have I conformed myself into what I imagined a Buddhist should be like, ignoring anything else that didn't quite fit? And yet, and yet, whatever I choose to call myself will have its built in limitations. Just one window from which to view the world and our place within it, never the complete panorama.
Even if you decide to be a non conformist, a non joiner of organised religions, a free spirit, it is equally a label, an imaginative habit to blend a sense of one's self into. Though its dressed up in the language of liberty and freedom of expression, it is basically another vague catagory to place a boundary around what you might be or become.
Whilst I may imagine myself as free to be anything I want, I feel the pull of grasping at external circumstances for identity. A sense of belonging to mirror your reflection through. So I hover, without settling on either certainty or uncertainty, the holding on to craving or the letting go into the unknown. Travelling this 'middle way' can be lonely work. It's impossible to truly know who you really are and what you want. One is never entirely free of ones history, habits and hubris, and why should we be?
We talk quite casually about realising our True Self, as if you can cast off everything that you've been previously. Who I am seems more akin to an ongoing evolution, everything built upon the foundations of whatever has preceded it. Zen talks of rediscovering the Original Self, the state once papancha (mental proliferation ) ceases to dominate. This resembles a way of being more at peace with whatever we are right now, whether its a mixed up muddle or clear headed clarity. Whichever it is matters not. Let go of it. Avoid rigidly aligning a sense of who you are with anything. For all these things will fade in order to become something else, as will I.
I've disliked football from early childhood. Too many memories of the indignities and bullying on and off the field, to remain charitable. These mean I often think of the sport entirely through my bruised pride, with a large degree of pain and derision. Yes, I can affect a mild interest, if only for the sake of male small talk. But there is no real enthusiasm, no passion there. So whilst I wished our national team well in the Euros, I would be lying if I said I cared that much about the outcome. Football, for me is too tied up with a particular form of masculine endeavour, prowess and competitiveness, that I have always felt kept on the outside of. And don't get me started on patriotism as a substitute for self esteem. For me football is not so much of a beautiful but a revolting game.
One sultry evening Hubby and I sat on the beach having an alfresco evening meal. In our line of sight a gaggle of mothers watched their offspring happily swimming in the sea. One by one the kids got out and dried off, the Mums started packing up in order to go eat. One twelve year old boy carried on splashing around. The chubby boy complained, he didn't want chips again, and sulked uncooperative amongst the tidal foam. The Mum repeatedly urging him to get out. The boy began making halfhearted attempts to emerge, bleating about how he was tired, and then that he couldn't get out because the sea was dragging him back under. The kid got wilder in his hysteria. The Mum refusing to put on her beach shoes to come and rescue him. 'I'm dying' he cried with all the melodramatic pathos a ten year old can summon.
Then a near by gentleman came forward to kindly offer his help. The kid very noticeably rejected him and pushed his hands away. Evidently this was not a real life threatening situation. Was this pride, or emotional manipulation, a strategy to get his Mum to do his bidding. It was so transparently the latter that it was rather pathetic. The boy's whining tone turned increasingly tearful and shrill. Oh the indignity of having such an uncaring Mum. If only he realised how unsympathetically we surrounding beach goers were, viewing this obvious charade going on among the waves. It was embarrassing to behold.
I recently re-watched Jason & The Argonauts, a film I fondly remember from my childhood. These days it is known as a Ray Harryhausen movie. Poor Don Chaffey, the actual director, has had his entire career upstaged by animated dolls. These stop motion animated figures were part of an emerging technical revolution that made this movie famous. Released in 1963, the movie stands up well. However wobbly and stilted the animation, it brings a certain otherworldly character to them, that todays more hyper realistic CGI rarely does. The acting declaims a lot, but is more than passable, some of the stuck on beards are unbelievably fake, the togas far too pristine, the women's hair are either 60's bouffants or Bardot bobs, and the Golden Fleece had gold tinsel very obviously woven through it. But for the period the production values were quite high.
If such a film were made today they would have shoehorned a female into the Argonauts, who could kick ass better than the men. And the men, well, they'd all show signs of spending far too much rehearsal time in the gym making sure they were as buff as possible on camera. In 1963 however, you saw a much wider variety of body torso types, in a spectrum ranging from skinny twinks to flabby old codgers, only one of them looked to have identifiable muscles and abs. This was a quite representative range of body shapes in sixties manhood, at least within the acting profession, than that of todays film 'fit til they bulge' generation.
One of our early morning pleasures this summer, before we open the shop, is to drive to Cromer and walk along the Promenade. Heading in the direction of North Sea Coffee. Where the coffee is good but not gold star, the cakes are homely and made in heaven. A Flat White and a Date Slice, in my case, and a Large White Americano and a Brownie, for Jnanasalin, awaits.
On our way there, we pass another cafe in mid process if setting up. It has a banner outside that continues to amuses me. It is really a very profound spiritual teaching on the true nature of reality, declaring boldly that there is - 'A Whole Lotta Lush In Every Cup of Slush'
Couldn't agree more.
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