Pondering it, I realized that the process of adulthood, of maturation, is precisely living to live between lines, of restricting yourself in some way. You can’t have it all. You can’t do and be all things. You cannot simultaneously have your freedom and be in a committed relationship. You both lose and gain when you have children. You can’t pick both of the career paths that you want. You can’t (in most cases) marry both of the women or men you love for different reasons. You can’t have this house AND that house. You can’t live here AND there. The money you spend on A is no longer available for B, no matter how much money you have. The costs of A and B just go up.
Looking at it, thinking, I thought that the boundaries of self you choose are what enable experience to be poured into you and retained. If you never choose a self, if you keep all options open by making no decisions, then the beer–the experience–poured into you is wasted, since there is no receptacle to receive it.
Now, of course we all “know” that we are supposed to find ourselves. Maybe we are supposed to spend a year hitchhiking Europe, or join a commune, or climb all the mountains in North America, or study cooking in Paris, or whatever.
It seems to me, though–and I think I have said this a number of times–that no matter what you do, it is never enough. The thirst never ceases for something else. I lived in Northern California, and knew a lot of people who did a lot of interesting things. But it always seemed as if they were comparing notes as to who did the coolest stuff, and competing with one another. They were COLLECTING.
For my part, I had done enough crazy shit by age 23 or so that I am still processing it many years later. And I don’t know if it was worth it. I remember being driven to do “interesting” things, but never really savoring it. I don’t know if this is my particular problem–and no doubt I have this issue at a minimum more than most–or something general.
But think, as an example, of a Tibetan monk, spending 3 years in solitary meditation. That is an extraordinarily narrow definition of self: “he who meditates”. But is this not a glass with a narrow lip, but enormous potential depth?
You have to choose boundaries. You must accept, in principle and reality, the limitations that are inherent even in the wealthiest, freest, most opportunity-rich world in human history. This should not need saying, I would think, but I feel that it does. I feel that we are given the implicit guarantee as children, in this country at least, that life is supposed to be easy. This means that when confronted with the necessity of sacrifice, of constant choosing this over that, of renouncing this to have that, many of our children balk. This is the root of grunge, and even of hippies: it is the perpetual adolescence necessitated by refusing to accept that choices have to be made. Why not keep all options open in a dreamland fueled in no small measure by drugs?
Then I was thinking about the Buddhist concept of No Self (anatta). Does not the Buddhadharma very narrowly define correct action? There are all sorts of boundaries Buddhism places on monks, which are very much more strict than those of normal society. They get a self–a behavioral code–handed to them, in a manner not that different from military recruit training. You are born again, into a new way of living, which defines you.
Then I got to thinking about the Taoist empty cup. The cup is empty, but by definition it can be filled. It is not empty space alone: it is empty space FORMED within delimited space. You don’t want the cup filled because you want to be able to take in new experience. But if there is no cup, there is no Subject, no?
Do you want a bottomless cup? A transparent cup? That is where I got a little off track. Beer was after all involved.
Anyway, few musings from a muser.