While I do in many ways feel bad about putting up words written from a previous iteration of myself, today is not the day for any more words. Between email both personal and business, another piece of the training manual I've begun working on and miscellaneous notes and ideas I've managed to put in at minimum of 3,000 (hopefully) unique sentences. Like the BP spill, the actual total may be much higher, somewhere in the range of 5K, so I'll suffice to say I have put in my work for the day. I didn't intend to write as much as I did, but we must roll as life requires - besides I put myself into my writings today, whole heartedly and more deeply than a blog deserves, so with the lesson learned I turn to a little time with the guitar and some much needed rest.
And with that I turn it over to me. It's quite a trip to reflect and review our earlier production - very little of it actually seems like our words. I've been both surprised and appalled in my reflections (I thought that was a good idea?), but I enjoy the topic below and hoped to soon revisit the idea. Have a lovely night all, and enjoy the November 17, 2008 edition of what was then "Enjoy your worries, you may never have them again."
What makes a good day? What makes a good week? What about a good life? Vogue questions, but what about it’s contrast? What makes for a good moment to moment? It seems that in the same vein as General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, we will end up needing separate theories for each system. Before we can however, we should really frame the problem as it stands today.
Since ancient times, the question of a good life has pervaded society. Eudaemonia, a popular study of Plato’s , concerns itself with the study of “human flourishing.” I’m generally loath to equate concepts (there are no synonyms damn it!), for my purposes we’ll assume that the good life is a “flourishing life”. What then is this eudaimonic existence? On the grand scale, what form can we put to this concept? Some would argue that it is living the golden rule, others would contend the answers lies in the service done to others. If you’re a capitalist it’s most likely who dies with the most toys and if you’re a Buddhist most likely you think that there is no question to be asked: the overwhelming joy of existence and thrill of opportunity to push aside the atmosphere we walk though for a few more minutes is plenty, even when expanded to the timeline of all existence.
I’ve pondered this question more than once in the travels of mind to the fuzzy area between philosophy and spirituality, and I’ve come to a few scenic conclusions, but unfortunately I don’t find them relevant. Not today, not here. It’s not because these aren’t important or urgent queries – otherwise there would not be a multibillion dollar self help industry. It’s not that these aren’t interesting questions, or else the philosophers and the clerics would not have concerned themselves with them. It’s not that they aren’t deeply personal – for the definition of a flourishing life touches not only an individual’s perception of the world, but also her or his actions in it, the dreams that arise from it and the goals that create those ephemeral yet addicting feelings of success and failure as we move about within it. No, the only reason to say “to hell with it” is that when we take a look at a compressed timeline, a moment or two, we realize that the questions to be answered in the minutiae are of a completely different kind.
How so? What could possibly be the difference between the two? The disparity lies in the experience of the moment, how we perceive our needs. The eudaemonic ideal changes here: it becomes not about what the soul needs but what the body needs, not what the mind needs but this body must have. I need to treat everyone with the same respect because it is what I believe – it is not only what I believe is right, but it is the world that I would like to live in (I would argue that a flourishing life is nothing more than creating the world that you would like everyone else to live in; an “if everyone behaved this way all life would be ideal” kind of thing). I’m drinking another glass of wine now because I like feeling the wrinkles of my mind relax, hopefully coaxing some inspiration from the electricity of my brain to the electricity running through the mac to the electrons holding together the server at blogspot to the photons encouraging your eyes to stimulate the thought and word identification centers of your mind causing your own circuitry to fire (just imagine how much is lost in translation!).
We simply want different things from both levels of analysis. I won’t worry about feeding the science club after school if I’m more concerned with my desire to be entertained now. When I’m trying to live a flouring existence, I know that the 4th glass of wine is not contributing to that end; it’s not conducive to my success. To attempt to compare the two is to deny their fundamental incompatibility – the stimuli that help us achieve the best “now” are entirely different than those that help us achieve the best “ever”.
Perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps there are those who truly align both their moment-to-moment ideals with their concepts of the overarching élan, and to you I say “phooey”. Think of all the urges that the body has throughout the day. Not in the gross sense of the word, but consider the flash of longing as the attractive coworker glides by, the itch to run outside as we see the rays of the setting sun glint off of any surface that will reflect, the itch of intrigue and titillation at being left speechless, (by 8:45 am, it was a good day today). The body and its immediate experience seeks the most vivid flash of stimuli, while the life lived seeks the highest ideal (whatever that ideal is changes by participant, I do not judge). I admit that this requires accepting the idea that our immediate experience is run by the body. It requires admitting that our immediate needs and wants must be treated separately from what we need and want from life. We all feel it, yet modern ideas of how to live marginalize, even demonize these impulses, the very things which make us feel most alive, right now (which I would say is the flourishing, good life in the purest sense of the notion). It’s a bit of a mind stretch to see that we have two different systems at work in the holism of our animation and beyond, but once we abstract our concepts from our reactions, I think the view becomes clearer. I realize now that this can of worms is too stuffed with annelids for one nights exposition: as always I hope to spark some debate, let me know what you think. In any case, the next time you get the itch in the moment, try scratching it and see if you aren’t better for just saying yes.
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