My Relationship with Apathy

Apathy and I like to flirt dangerously with one other. I inch a little closer; it flashes me a knowing wink; I giggle nervously; it nonchalantly invites me back to its place while checking out the reflection of some other girl in the mirror ... we're all about playing games really, especially if it gets a couple drinks in me, turns down the lights and up just the right music.

Except deep down I know I'm too addicted to the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain to follow through. Which makes me kind of a tease. And the flirting only goes one way-- it couldn't care less about our relationship. Which makes me kind of pathetic. But I've generally come to terms with that. 

For me, it's like stepping out onto a 14-story balcony (give or take a couple stories), and feeling that inexplicable magnetic urge just to jump. You know you're not gonna do it, but you're a little intoxicated by the allure of so radically unexpected a thought pattern. Perhaps so profoundly even, that you may head back indoors just to change the subject. A nice predictable conversation about how small the cars look or how the balcony is perfect for a barbecue or how weird the elevator smelled or how you were surprised by how windy it was up there, should quickly induce a come-down from that kind of electrically palpable high. 

So yeah, it's probably never gonna really happen between us, me and Apathy. I'm too petrified to commit to the leap, and it's no good at opening up and really allowing another person in emotionally. I think I just like the idea of it. Sometimes though, I pretend we've gotten engaged just to mess with my mom a bit. Mostly out of boredom. 

The other night she insisted that all the roommates (me, her, and my dad) discuss the highlights and lowlights of our days over dinner. I glazed my eyes over with a light coat of indifference (so far i only use washable paint in that shade) and formed a sigh of resignation around the words "there are no ups or downs in monotony, mother." 

She called me a drama queen-- fair enough-- to which I responded, "UCH! MOM! THIS IS THE GREATEST PLAY I'LL EVER STAR IN! ALL THE WORLD'S MY STAGE AND AS A MERE PLAYER I THOUGHT EVEN YOU COULD UNDERSTAND THAT"

"Our" puppy barked and scratched herself. My father looked up from his blackberry and said "that's nice dear." Whatever. Last time I invite Apathy over for dinner.

What's so exhaustingly paradoxically annoyingly beautifully hilarious about all of this, is how emotional I get about pursuing a relationship with Apathy. This point is clearly evidenced by my Caps-Lock reaction to my mother's belittling of us being together. (Hi mom). 

It's not that I consider Apathy to be some sort of ultimate ideal. Far from something that I'm striving for, I find it lying in wait around every nonlinear corner, a shadow lurking deep within the greys of rejected dichotomies. Like a self-deprecating fling I can never seem to quite sever ties with it. The quicksand of uncertainty's landscape, it swallows you whole should your feet become heavy with the absence of light heartedness. In other words, prying open the floodgates of thought to include not only black and white, but the entire range of vibrating frequencies is not all fun and games. I mean, you've got this flood of electromagnetic energy comin atcha, masquerading as waves today and particles tomorrow, and a gal is bound to get confused in the dance from time to time. Grey is murky, and it's a scary thing to wade through. It's much easier to deal with existence while anchored to absolutes (which obviously I fully am, please don't think I think I'm not, oh god I hope you don't think I think I'm not), those landmarks make it way harder to get lost.

I have found my attempted exploration and experimentation with a pursuit of truth founded not in pillars of certainty but in uncertainty, to be like straddling a teeter totter that tends toward awe on one side and apathy on the other. It should also be noted that were I not living at home with all of my basic needs not only met but wildly exceeded, I would likely not spend so much time floating around in the abstract of my abnormally large stupid head. Really, it is literally abnormally large-- when I was a baby my parents sometimes had to cut the collars of my shirts in order to fit them over my massive noggin. 

Nonetheless, my extremes in experiences of both awe and apathy, have each made me cry a little.

This could explain why I've come to be so skeptical and distrustful of my emotions, and also why my mom thinks I'm a drama queen. But there's that pesty spectrum illusion again, and the inherent associated assumption of opposites. The (a) challenge, I'm realizing, is not necessarily to keep things tilted out of apathy's favor, but rather to stretch the teeter totter until its two points meet-- and then finding a way to live there.

Ideally, this would also minimize my mood swings. 

NB: If anyone has any practical suggestions for this, please feel free to share them because I'm doing that annoying thing again where I intellectualize myself so far away from my body that I no longer know how to a build a bridge that translates my thoughts into daily life. Does that make them pointless? Maybz. Maybz not.

There's this amazing Buddhist saying I've been taught, that I find so liberating and also so terrifying. It advises that when one comes to meet the Buddha face to face, in that he or she has so realized the Buddha's teachings that they are partying side by side on the pinnacle of awakening, then this person should cut off the Buddha's head. GASP. An explanation being that even the path of the Buddha in all its wisdom is still binding, even reverence of so enlightened a being is still a form of attachment, and it is only in letting go of this teacher/journey/constellation of choices, that one can truly achieve enlightenment. 

K, it's not like I'm plotting the decapitation of religious leaders, and I certainly never expect to chill with the Buddhz. But still, what a powerful idea (which I guess I also shouldn't cling to heavily to... uch see what I mean?) In this context, I am choosing(ish) to understand that neither awe nor apathy are to be considered as ultimate goals, or points at which to grow stagnant. It's not like I've successfully mastered the teeter totter of absurdity if I plop myself down on the awe side always and forever and leave my old flame Apathy out to dry on the other end of some illusory line. These ideas- like Buddhist philosophy- these experiences- like awe and apathy- can serve as points of orientation along the way. But if you ever actually manage to commit to them wholeheartedly (and not just flirt), you better have your sword at the ready because they're not really the end or the ultimate, they're just there to help us navigate the swirling greys. 

A Treasure Hunt: In Pursuit of a Tasty Slice of "Time-Space Pie"

Emotions are fleeting. I'm in a good mood but I don't trust it. Because I don't know why I'm in a good mood when yesterday I was in a bad one. I could make up reasons and fool myself into believing them, I guess, but I'm not really in the mood. But I could be tomorrow. How obnoxious.
Slap the Eternity Syndrome onto that sucker, and you've got yourself a paradox my friend. I think. Ow owww! (to be pronounced in the high frequency range where flirtation becomes so obvious that it comes to symbolize the exact opposite, and does an arrogant little jig)

Anyways, some train of thought so irrational that to put it to words would be unsettling, got me thinking of pirates this morning. When I realized I was thinking about pirates, I naturally envisioned a ship full of Johnny Depps battling scurvy, applying eyeliner, and searching for treasure-- after all, what else is a gal to think about pirates in this day and age? While the prototype for the contemporary hypothetical pirate is clear, the contents of that buried chest are far more blurry-- at least in "my" brain.
**Sidenote: The reason I put quotation marks around "my" there, is because the phrase "my brain" implies that there is something independent of the brain that not only makes up who I am, but has enough freaking seniority to claim dominion over the twists and turns of the cerebral cortex! I'm not sure I'm in a position to make that assumption, especially about my own self. Yikes just got lost for a second thinking about the layers of what that doozy would entail**

But back to treasure. My inclination initially was to ramble on about how true treasure would be the sincere realization of all things as gifts, without feeling compelled to labor over some complex rendering of a giver that necessarily imprisoned the infinite within the trappings of "our" minds. Or coming to the genuine understanding that treasure is buried nowhere other than beneath the layers of our selves, and that to unearth it one need turn only inward. And yes, I guess theoretically I do think that would be just dandy. But the dumb current obnoxious fleeting reality is that I am SO far away from that place that pretending to go there, or going there intellectually but leaving all else behind, or hypothesizing about what it might be like to go there, is just annoying- even painful. And kind of irrelevant to my daily life. Kind of. It's a nice lighthouse to orient towards, but it's skipping FAR too many steps from where I'm at.

Because we all know, or know someone who knows, or know someone who knows that we know even though we don't think we do, what it is to feel that emptiness. That hollow ache that assures us there is no secret map with which to navigate this void. And that if X marks the spot, then every other letter of the alphabet is festering inside of us. Twenty-five clashes of sound and shape and symbols of anything other than treasure. Words like trappings, then, cannot be applied to the abstract in any way other than being trapped, enslaved even, to an inability to experience meaning. And you're the one, not the treasure, that's buried. **cue response that they're one and the same, a person and their treasure-- maybe, but I can't say it in a way that means anything really because I'm too far away from actually knowing it on any type of sustained experiential level. And, even more so, it can't mean anything (in an immediate, practical sense) to someone experiencing what I just described. And so effectively it's useless. Some treasure.

And so, for now, I'm paradigm-shifting my view of what's in the treasure chest from the distant abstract ideal to the practical, to the building of a bridge over that vastness-- to the baby steps that will slowly orient our passage through time toward ("to" seems really overly ambitious, at least for me) such liberating lofty realizations. To the things that feel like treasure in the moment, in that reality, to the infusion of taste into that ridonkulous slice of "time and space pie." And I'm doing it hoping that I will always allow that conscious paradigm to continue its natural shift into alignment with what feels balanced for where I'm at. I think that if/when I don't, then when that inevitable shift does come it is all the more abrupt, and so all the more painful and not-fun.

And so the fantastical treasure chest that I pursue (but as a ship full of Johnny Depps, you know like that weird thing that happens when you're dreaming sometimes) is at least for now in a state of perpetual dynamism. Rather than hold within it a realization that is lightyears away from my current orbit, or perhaps in a different metaphor what I am orbiting around, the treasure in the chest is fluid and it's also a guide. It's what you do in just this moment to experience happiness, and in doing so move closer toward that ultimate bliss. So I guess you're kind of filling the chest in the exact instant that you open it and find the treasure. Rather than render the pursuit pointless, this can, I think, transform all of life into the search. But not a quest toward a good that will someday come, that will someday validate and justify all of life thus far. In this paradigm of treasure hunting, the treasure is being found and changed and found again in every instant of growth. Way more gratifying, no? But more so it's real and it's practical and things are not for the good that lies ahead,  but rather they are the good. They are the treasure.

...Did this make sense? I'm pretty sure I know what I mean. I apologize if it wasn't articulated so clearly, the paradigm shift thing kind of happened only as I typed it out. So I guess I owe you another thank you... :) And on that note I'm also throwing out there the hope that I wasn't the only one that got something out of this blog, please just have your way with it-- do whatever so that it means something to you please. I think that would be really great.

PS the lead singer of a band I saw tonight must have been in her mid-to-late-60s. The little place was packed, and she wore a vest and a turtleneck and had grey hair and sang her heart out and it was so beautiful and I was literally flushed with emotion. Her name was Joanne and her band was called the Joannimals! I think that lady might know something I'd love to know someday.