The Good Life & its Demons

I’m driving home today, after a bikram yoga workout, sipping on coffee and listening to the radio. The sun is smiling brilliantly on what could otherwise be a dreary November day in the Pacific Northwest. A top 40 hit comes on, positive and upbeat, urging me to consider how amazing life is. My life.

Automatically I think about Lesotho. I recall how little people have there materially compared to the states and how much that didn’t seem to matter. I think about how beautiful and normal life seemed there, and how I stopped noticing the material poverty that I am much more aware of now that I have the shining streets of America to compare it with.

So why do we have so many demons in our daily lives here? Demons in the form of doubts, self-consciousness, stress, fear, isolation, that never seem to give us a break from questioning even the smallest decisions.

The inertia of any society pulls people along in the collective direction of their culture. Perhaps in societies like the one in Lesotho, where people don’t have much and are never taught to question the status quo, its easier to go along with the pull of the current, simply because people don’t have the skills to swim against it.

So, what’s so different about America?

We have many different currents to choose from, for starters. Our culture is just as adept at creating rules and people are fantastic at self-policing themselves and others to adhere to the many different sets of status quos. We have the opportunities for learning different skills that let us swim around and find a place for ourselves, it’s not easy though. Our ocean is polluted with really, really pretty lifeboats. It’s filled with shiny, comfortable junk that is easy to hold onto, grow attached to and just float on for the rest of our lives.

This is where I think the mind demons come in and do their work. Right now I’m hanging onto a particularly comfortable, yet not terribly exciting lifeboat. It’s free, spacious and demands very little from me in terms of taking risks or facing my fears. The biggest of which is that I was swimming for a really long time, and felt like I was EXACTLY where I needed to be in my life, and now that it’s finished, I’m lost. I was fulfilling a long-standing goal in my life to live and work overseas, and I can honestly say I’ve never felt more free and honest to myself as I did in the last few years in Lesotho.

I have no idea where to go from here. I want to take things one day at a time, but I feel totally overwhelmed in this spacious and junk filled ocean that is life in America. So the mind demons have had free reign over the last few weeks, constantly sneaking up on me, trying to distract me from the most obvious, new aspect of my life. Which is, that I’m extremely, extremely lucky to have fulfilled so many of my goals. That I have a lifeboat to hold onto while I decide which way to swim next, and most importantly, that I come from a privileged place and have the choices open to me to take me to even more amazing places and adventures in life.

The health dangers of thoughtfulness

19/10/11

It’s a dreary Monday afternoon in the glorious state of Washington. Mondays are terrible even if you happen to be unemployed. Perhaps its something in the water. Whatever the cosmic reason for zapping all sense of hope, joy and satisfaction out of life and replacing it with a granite boulder in the pit of your stomach and an ugly, gray veil over your eyes, it happens to the best of us.

So it was with me, fresh off the plane from Lesotho and travels abroad and back in the land of my middle class suburban upbringing. One week in, and I find myself having coffee with a friend I had met while in Lesotho. This part of the day goes splendidly, and for a few hours Seattle seems to brighten. Soon the afternoon hour approaches and I find myself alone in my car without any other plans for the day.

My muscle memory directs me back to the freeway, onto the on ramp, and without so much as a conscious decision I’m hurtling north towards my parents suburbs at 60 mph. Immediately I balk at the trajectory Monday has deposited me on, and pull off at the next exit, determined to not let this day go to waste, by doing one of the things mankind is known best for; sitting and smoking or smoking and sitting. I’ll be damned if I let this opportunity for a cig and a calm thought pass me by. I’m not really much of a smoker, but everything has its time and place, including a Marlboro light.

Anybody who has ever smoked a cigarette knows that there is something magical about finding the right spot for the cig break. Often this place might include steps to perch on, a friend’s kitchen table, or a quiet spot in nature. I was heading for the latter, seeing as I had no interest in loitering, have no smoking friends in the area of America, and needed to gather my thoughts.

I drove straight to Greenlake, the closest body of water and natural spot that I was aware of. Maybe I’ll even stroll for a few minutes, I thought as I parked my car and began gathering my things. Getting out of the car, I take a glance at the lake that I vaguely recall from my childhood Sunday afternoons.

One pair of joggers goes by, then a man with a dog, followed by a herd of teenagers. All jogging. The scene begins to repeat itself with intensifying horror as more and more teenagers, moms, university students and countless single men of undeterminable age jog by with their canines. The entire lake is literally overrun by runners. This is not conducive at all to my puff-puff mood. I can feel their collective hate at my Marlboro Light from two blocks away.

I slink into the back streets, where I had seen a bench. The bench was in a roundabout I had passed and was set in front of a cow sculpture of sorts. I skip up to the bench, cig and lighter in hand, finally ready for my perfect moment of thought gathering. The bench is completely wet, Monday, it seems, has pissed all over everything that isn’t being jogged next to. Also there is a man in a yard facing me that has stopped doing his yard work and looks like he is about to either yell at me or yell a lot at me. I have no choice but to leave the “art cow” and her unusable bench in the roundabout, and take a walk instead. I light my cigarette and stroll unsatisfactorily up and around the block back to my car. The smoke burns and doesn’t inspire, it tastes toxic instead of sweet and restful. I finish my cigarette earlier than I had wanted, and throw it onto the ground to stomp it out. Just as I stomp it, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of paranoia that someone is watching me and is about to call the police, or at least chastise me for littering. I hastily pick up the cigarette butt and look around for an appropriate area of filth to toss it into. The sidewalks are spanking clean, and I’m almost at my car when the opportunity presents itself in the form of a piece of plastic and one other cigarette butt.

I drive on, finding myself at a mall. As I walk up to the main entrance I feel a stir of acceptance when I come across a mother smoking in front of her stroller. I walk into the mall, turn around and walk right out wrestling with the morality of feeling at home with the sight of baby second-hand smoke, and Monday takes over.