“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”

Back in 2015, when I was living in Taiwan and jobless for the summer, I went to a 10-day meditation course.

You can read about my initial silent shenanigans here:

https://glutthemaw.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-class-is-pain-101-your-instructor.html

I got a lot out of that experience, but subsequently fell away from serious practice.

I decided it was once again time to punch my punya card.

Last week, I took a 4 ½ hour drive out to the rural Northern Illinois town of Pecatonica and did another 10-day meditation here in the mid-west.

Things got…interesting.

Let me spin ya a yarn of meditation and ontological skirmishes.

~

I’d been getting pretty stressed out lately.

Manifested unconscious clamoring in my 30’s looks a little different than it did in my 20’s.

Instead of the constant questions of “why are we here, and what does that mean?”, I get the daily interrogation of “what are you doing with your life and what career should you pursue?”

There’s also a healthy does of “Hey asshole, you wasted your 20’s and you should already have this figured out”, but this ain’t about my internal self-abuse.

It’s about something I do to mitigate that.

Coming in to the course, I knew the deal. There is a worldwide organization that holds these meditations, and regardless of if you’re in Far East Asia or the American Mid-West, they are run exactly the same way.

I showed up, checked in, and sat at a table by myself, like Aragorn in the Prancing Pony (because I’m so cool!), purposely sitting away from the congregation of men that were chatting and laughing it up.

I heard one gregarious and portly young man loudly declare “I’m going to talk as much as possible until we can’t. I gotta get it out, man. I got to get it all out.”

I leaned over and said,

“I got the opposite plan. If I don’t start talking to you guys, I won’t have the temptation to keep talking to you.”

Another guy with hair to his shoulders and a thick beard looked right at me and said,

“Well, I look forward to meeting you in 10 days.”

~

The bell rung at 4:00 AM and I got up without delay. I threw on my sweat pants and hoody and walked immediately outside into the cool late winter air. The farm we were on was quiet and bucolic. The stars still hung in the sky and the moon lit the way on my 2-minute walk from our dorm to the meditation hall.

I settled onto my cushion as we began the 3-day stint on the practice of Anapana.

I’m now what they call an “old student”, because I’ve already completed a 10-day sitting.  Being an old student, I was to forget about the sensations I felt on the nose, and focus all my attention on respiration.

Don’t control it. Just observe it.

Run your blades of concentration down the sharpening stone.

Build your faculties of awareness for the coming days.

Prepare for the battle.

The first few days were like a sort of boot camp. We’re allowed a little more leeway with our postures and movement. We talked in private to the assistant teacher, complaining of inability to keep focused, pain in our legs and backs, and distractions from other students.

He encouraged us to keep working.

“Patiently and persistently. Patiently and persistently.”

After Day 3, we began the practice of Vipassana.

What sensations do you feel?

Don’t react.

What pleasure do you feel?

Don’t react.

What pain do you feel?

All of it! My knees are on fire. My back feels like it’s about to break. My hips…

Don’t react, damn you!

Crave nothing. Avoid nothing. Be aware. Always. Remain. Equanimous.

We started the act of Strong Determination.

3 times a day, for a full hour, we sit crossed legged on the floor and we don’t move.

Boot camp was over. It was time for battle.

During my first 10-day meditation, I was frequently bored. I was often just waiting for things to be over. My mind wondered for entire hours and I wrote stories and held conversations in my head.

This time was different.

I mean, I still sidetracked myself.

 It’s strange how difficult it is just to hold your attention on one specific thing. And it’s even stranger to see where your mind goes when you remove vast chucks of external stimuli and force yourself to sit still with your eyes closed for long periods of time.

Some thoughts that occupied my mind:

What do I know about the country of Moldova?

Were I ever to meet Edie Falco, what would I say to her?

If I were a Jean-Claude Van Damn movie, which one would I be?

(I settled on The Quest. Let’s face it, I’m no BloodSport.)

But it was different, because I was more quickly able to bring myself back from the deviating path, and refocus on my practice.

I think that difference came from experience.

Not to say that I’m such a high-level practitioner, but I was starting to get a glimpse of deeper meditative states.

And in that deepness, I felt something I had never felt before while meditating.

I felt fear.

I went to a lower realm. An internal room of vast open blackness, in which time doesn’t exist, and where you come to realize that the content of your mind is so largely manifested outside of your conscious control, that there is no way it could possibly define you as a person.

And if that thoughtstream isn’t you…

Then just who the hell are you?

I was going into places my unconscious did not want me.

And it sent its Pretorian guards to kick me the hell out.

They arrived in the form of distraction.

All the meanderings of an unfocused mind, I began to see them as enemy combatants.

It was like I had to fight myself to obtain access to that deeper level.

I felt like Arjun preparing for war.

But not only was I Arjun, I was Kirshna, counseling and encouraging myself.

Even more so, I was also the adversary they faced on the battlefield.

I was Wolverine, (had to get that allusion in there again somehow) facing Azreal, the personification of Death, in battle every time he physically dies to obtain the ability of resurrection. And I was Azreal.         *

My mind was a back alley arena in Hong Kong, and I was both the noble Frank Dux and the villainous Chong Li as they faced one another in… DAMN IT, JAY!

YOU ARE NOT BLOODSPORT! 

All my engines worked in juxtaposition, for and against myself.  

I looked at the door to the meditation hall like it was the black gate to Mordor.

 (That’s right...Two LOTR references in one blog post.)

I felt visceral fear when I arrived at the entryway to remove my shoes and prepare for the sitting. I walked through it like I was entering the arena.

Day 5 was unlike anything I have ever experienced.

My mind exploded in hallucinations.

Obi-Wan clanged large poker chips the size of cymbals in my face, all along wearing a look of complete apathy on his countenance.

A chorus line of showgirls danced the can-can while adorning Iron Man masks as a backdrop of old western six-shooters spun behind them.

Pinhead from Hellraiser, styled with a kaleidoscopic mohawk, catapulted a florescent hedgehog from his hand and I watched as it launched through deep space, glowing a brilliant neon green before dissolving into fire, and then into nothing.

I was sweating bullets. I could feel my face scrunching up and my teeth bearing down on themselves. I was holding my breath and my body was shaking.

I was having a pretty good time.

I requested to speak to the assistant teacher during our lunch break.

“What can I help you with?”

“I’m experiencing very…uh..psychedelic hallucinations?”

“That’s actually not uncommon. Try and get through it. I know it can be unsettling, and difficult to…”

“Actually, I’m kind of enjoying it.”

“Oh…well…you know. Just don’t crave it.”

After that day, I never had another one.

My mind doubled down on its efforts to derail me. It was like the devil, taking different shapes to attain his ultimate goal. He’ll be your best friend, or your worst enemy. He’ll be a salesman, or an assassin. He’ll change tactics so quickly and skillfully; you’ll have no idea the conman took you until he’s long gone.

“I see you’re trying to focus there. Consider this, you’re a fucking loser, that’s never done shit, and will never do shit.”

Keep working.

“Remember that girl you used to date? She was a looker, huh? Say, remember that one night when you guys…”

Patiently and persistently.

“Life is long, eh? I know!  Let’s think about memories you have long since forgotten, going in reverse chronological order.”

Remain aware.

“Look, just because you wasted your 20’s, doesn’t mean you can’t turn it all around. We should brainstorm every single possible career choice there is out there.”

And equanimous.

“What are you even doing here, man? You joining a cult? If you think about it, this is some pretty weird shit to be doing.”

You’re bound to be successful. 

Hours started to pass quickly, and the fear began to recede.

The pain in my body began to turn into subtle vibrations, and I was able to occasionally scan my whole self without distraction. 

The idea is that if you can cut off the instinctive reaction of judgment to sensation at the physical level, this will in turn result in the same acceptance to the multitude of thoughts that arise and disappear as quickly (or slowly) as those feelings in your body.

Everything is always changing.

Understand this, and it will free you from the constant up and downs of unrecognized emotional reaction. It will sharpen your awareness of thought, and it will make it easy to control your behavior.

It’s way more intricate and complex than that, but there’s my dime store version of it.

The 10 days I spent there were full of juxtaposed mental states.

I ran the proverbial gamut.

Gutter depression one afternoon, tranquility that evening.

Anxiety in the morning, elation by lunchtime.

Hope at dusk, and discontent at dawn.

But as the days progressed, the meditation served to compress those emotional fluctuations. I began to feel stable, and even a bit detached, but in a good way.

One day, walking down a path by myself, I burst out laughing. The ridiculousness of the thoughts that were causing me stress seemed so obvious now.

 Why would I torture myself like that?

What was it that would cause my mind to so utterly turn on itself?

How pointless.

~

Day 10 came and Noble Silence was lifted. We could now chat amongst ourselves.

Although I had not spoken to any of these guys, not more than a few preliminary words at least, I had begun to consider them my friends. We slid into easy conversation and smiled and laughed as we recounted experiences. There was a lot of common threads amongst what we had all individually went through, although no one else seemed to have had the hallucinations like I did.

A doctor from Detroit and I were talking, and he smiled brightly and asked,

“I just want to know, is my face glowing like yours is?”

It was.

I fell into conversation with another guy about my age from Chicago.

He had wild blue eyes and spoke with zeal and listened with intent.

We talked about meditation, Zen, consciousness, psychology, and life in general.

We were laughing and excited and sharing ideas and interests.

I told him about the dark place.

The empty room. The black void that seemed to be at the bottom.

I told him that it scared me.

I told him I wasn’t sure if I was ready for what I may find there.

He got quiet and serious and looked me right in the eye.

“I know, man. I don’t know if I can handle it either…”

Then he grinned,

“...But that’s the fun part.”

https://www.dhamma.org

*Wolverine #48 (2003)

I got 99 problems... and most of them are derived from seemingly unanswerable questions about the nature of consciousness.

Consciousness is a funny thing.

It’s a complex subject, and one that captivates me.

In fact, consciousness is what allows me to be captivated. It’s what enables me to write this, and you to read this (presuming anyone is reading this).

Consciousness allows for subjectivity, and subjectivity demands consciousness.

Consciousness is history.

It’s the passage of time. It’s your favorite band. It’s nostalgia. It’s depression.

 It’s hope. It’s story.

It’s Ouroboros.

 My interest in this arose out of alarm. My consciousness, my subjective experience, ignited young and crept along at a slow burn. I was confused by the flame, and ran from it.

That’s like running into a different room to escape a burning house.

After the inevitable failure of flight, I tried to drown it. I poured gin and whiskey into my wetware and it soaked through my life until my bones absorbed it.  

That’s like trying to put out a fire with kerosene. 

Finally, after exhausting myself, those around me, and all other options besides lying down to die, I decided to simply let the flames burn.

And here I smolder.

Soon to follow will be the first entry in a 3 part series I’m writing on consciousness.

Part 1: My story         or:  A Ride with T-Bird and the Boys.

Part 2: My study        or: It’s More Than I Thought!

Part 3: My sojourn    or: Holding Hands with Marla.

I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time. It will be deeply personal, but also as academic as I’ve ever dared in my writing. The first part will be about my initial conflicts, mental health, addiction, and destruction.

The second part will be comprised of my (limited) studies into what exactly may be going on behind the scenes, and what that may imply for me as an individual, and an attempt to pull that veil of clouds back from across the great confused green sea.

And the third part will be my adaptive strategies, my current modality in terms of living as one of and amongst the confused, and any significant insights I’ve gleamed from my time in the trenches.

I hope it comes together in a cohesive and digestible manner. I hope it’s beneficial to others, and cathartic for myself.

I hope.

It’s been awhile since I have written.

Forgive me my hyperbole.

More soon.

-Jay

"Maybe I am a mess. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m out of my mind! But, god help me, I will keep these lights up until the day I die..."

Humans beings. People. All of us here today. We want things to make sense, so try to make sense of things. The difficulty in doing that, lies within the complex nature of reality. We make sense of this vast world by setting up systems and parameters, organizing with labels and classifications.

We have rituals, ceremonies, rites of passage, and traditions.

We facilitate these actions with language. Language meant to express meaning, significance, and milestones in our lives.

That’s an important word. Language.

It’s through language we share a common understanding of what life is. It plays a part in connecting us, but of course, doesn’t fully represent what we actually feel or experience.

And like the tradition of today’s ceremony, language was designed by people.

All for the purpose, of making things make sense.

You see, we all have this involved, complex, and all too often unexplored world of emotional charge and intellectual content and through the machinery of our language we boil it down to words.

Language was born out of necessity. Communication made the world we live in possible.

First, we developed words to discuss the outside world that we could easily navigate with our senses.

And once we all agreed and understood what everything outside us was, we were able to evolve language further.

We created names for people and places.

And words to help us evaluate these things.

And after we had catalogued the external world to a satisfactory degree, people were able to use the mechanics of language to chart the infinitely more complex scape of our internal worlds. Examining and analyzing with our newly formed capabilities, we started to map out human emotion.

But that’s an endeavor where we still fall short, because it is in-and-of-itself, an impossible task.

Because solely using words to describe an emotional state, say happiness, is like trying to describe the sky a beautiful sunset.

You can detail specifics, you can convey a personal feeling, you can layer on adjective after adjective, but it will never suffice as an actual representation of the beauty you witnessed. It’s impossible to communicate the true essence of the wonder we experience.

The beauty of the outside world is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder,

But inside?  Emotion in in the soul of the individual.

And what is it that impacts these emotions? What gives them rise?

Well, more things than I have time to go into right now. But I’d say it’s primarily a mixture of our personal histories. The combined experience of the places we go and the people we meet. And the events that arise in our lives, that are largely out of our control.

In fact, if you think about it, a lot of what happens in lives seems to be out of our control.

And one thing you definitely cannot control happens to be the same emotion that transcends these limitations of language.

The thing you can’t plan for is the same part of our inner world that IS easily understood through communication.

There is one feeling that demands itself to be known and seems to be required that you share it.

The sensation that eclipses all other emotions. The limitless inspiration of myriad books, movies, songs, poems, paintings, and dance throughout the collective of human history.

The very reason we are here today.

That thing, that one powerful thing is…

Love.

It doesn’t need a complex name, or a lengthy explanation. We don’t have to delve down into the depths of our unconscious state to examine its source.

Its mystery is as profound as our inability to deny it.

Yes, love is the exception.

With love, I don’t have to imagine what your sunset looks like, because it radiates enough for everyone to admire it.

I hope everyone here has felt that radiance before. And if you haven’t, well, you can feel it here today. I know I can.

And I felt it from the very first time I was in the same room as Jenny and Josh.

The way they talk to each other, they way the look at each other, their subtle body language, their care, concern, and compassion for each other, it all emanates the essence of the thing we call love.  

Love’s transcendence. Its inherent demand for acknowledgment. Its metaphysical origin pushing its way into our world by actually augmenting our very biological makeup, well it is a powerful thing.

Love is a feeling so powerful, that the human race, in all our diverse manifestations, has designed rituals and ceremonies solely to honor and celebrate the mystery of it.

And that is why we’re here today.  

I could continue to wax philosophical on love, but I’ll spare you. I will just give this advice, as it’s something I’ve found true in my own life:

Learn to recognize challenge as opportunity for growth.

Remember, going forward into your new lives together, that your love won’t always feel exactly like it does today. Because of the very nature of time and experience, you will change, and that love, your love,  will change along with you.

And it should.

Don’t hold onto a static representation of what you think it should look or feel like.

As life presents its trials, your love will be challenged.

That’s a good thing.

Because if we aren’t challenged, we stagnate.

But when we take on challenges, we grow better and stronger. And if you rise to meet those challenges together, your love will grow exponentially,

and your lives will be all the more enriched by the power of the love you have built with one another.

In closing, I want to say thank you. Like I said, humans want to make sense of things, or at least want things to make sense. And the two of you getting married, well few things in life make more sense than that

So, thank you.

Thank you for honoring your discovery of that feeling we call love, for being brave enough to commit to that love, and for inviting us all here to this ceremony to celebrate that love with you.

"I didn't know the forest spirit made the flowers grow..."

It’s been awhile. Lets kick things off with a convoluted quote from our boy Plato (Athens, 424ish-347 BCE) 

"What is filled with more real existence, and actually has a more real existence, is more really filled than that which is filled with less real existence and is less real.” (1) 

Yes. Awesome. Wait. What?

For me, this quote can be directly correlated to why I have converted to the way of Buddhism. Not the religious, deity worshipping ideology, but the philosophical, life living approach. (although I do prostrate, it’s more of a personal reminder to stay humble and a way to show respect to life). 

According to many philosophers, life has varying degrees of REALNESS. This realness can also be named FREEDOM. 

Not freedom in the sense of doing what you want, when you want, while saying what you want, to whom you want to (DON’T TREAD ON ME), but freedom from self. Or perhaps you could say freedom from the concept of self. A freedom that is accessible to everyone. A freedom that implies a higher level of reality. 

What is this reality you talk about?

Knowledge of one’s true motivations and implications that an identification with a self brings. 

While the man said “Know thyself”, maybe he meant “Know thy concept of self.” 

In knowing your “self”, I don’t mean your favorite color, what kind of smells you find detestable, or even your secret fantasies (you pervert). We have to get all comic book nerd on this shit and see what exists within the source material. Where do these things come from? Why do you feel that way? 

Particularly, why do you have the judgements, thoughts, and reactions you have, and, equally important, why do you make the decisions you make? Are you aware of the process? I don’t just mean sitting down and gathering knowledge for an informed decision, I mean what was the catalyst behind you wanting to make that decision in the first place? 

Do you understand why it is you do what you do? 

You do?

CONGRATULATIONS! That is freedom.  At least according to Hegel (Germany,1770-1831 CE) it is. 

According to Hagel, there are levels of reality consistent with the level of self-awareness a person has. So a person’s subjective reality is contingent on their ability to harness a macro perspective on their own thought processes. That is to say there is a higher plane of reality that exists on a spectrum that people are able to experience if they can tap into it. The deeper we tap into this, the wider our horizon of understanding self (catalyst for actions, defensive reactions, dependence of vice, reasons for decisions) becomes. And as we become cognizant of this vast spectrum of self, or what we had previously identified (or unconsciously identified) as self, the more we are able to access...

Well…

Freedom.

I thought we were talking about reality? 

Same thing.  Or so they say.

Who says? 

According to Stephen West, Hegel was saying “Something that makes itself what it is, is more fully real than something made by something else, and constantly dependent on something else.” (2) 

Sounds a little like Plato’s quote, right? 

The contrast being that Hegel was more focused on an external variable by which your internal is informed. But I think that that could just as easily be something manufactured from within. That is to say, unexamined thoughts or unrecognized patterns of mental processes that you let inform or control your decision making is just as inhibitory as the external stimuli that you let impact how you think, act, or behave. 

In dealing with both the external and internal, you need true recognition in order to be free.

Ok. Now, you’ve basically said freedom from self comes from awareness of self, but also implied that the concept of self or identification with a separate self is in and of itself wrong. Self. SELF! 

Well, here’s where it gets tricky. Or maybe not. Here is where this concept of freedom lies. Also, this is where I can find my personal connection to Buddhism and what I’m basing my current life approach around. 

I bring to the stage, my last contestant. Mr. Eckart Tolle (Earth, 1946-present). 

Mr. Tolle presupposes that that which we had previously established as freedom and/or reality is further conflated with BEING. 

Underneath our thought processes, under the internalized and learned mechanisms that make up the contents of what you address as YOU is pure consciousness. It not only exists in all of us, but it is the eternal that connects us all. It is being and it is right NOW. 

When is now? Well, regardless of what your clock says, it’s now. 

What does that mean?

Mr. Tolle says, 

"Nothing will ever happen in the past; it is happening now.

Nothing will ever happen in the future; it is happening now.” (3) 

Now is the constant. Underneath all the mental commentary, projections, anxieties and dread, expectations and hopes, disappointments and accomplishments, is now. 

It’s always now.

It’s impossible for it to be anything else. Now exists as the eternal in all of us, because we are all perpetually experiencing it. We color it with our own internal commentary, but it remains, unchanged underneath. It’s our connecting force, because it is in all of us. 

This “now” is the constant in our collective consciousness.

 It could be what some call God.

And if we accept, embrace, trust, and learn to tap into that, then the reality we experience becomes more real. Or maybe better put, you accept the real reality that has always been. 

We can look past what we previously identified as “self” and learn to identify  all those spinning gears that move, often against the flow, in our minds and lives. 

And how to we tap into this now? This being? 

Well, I’m not going to sit here and tell you I got it all figured out. Because dear god is that not true. But, I’m much more at peace, much more present in my life, much more compassionate, and generally more satisfied with my place in this world because I believe I’m on the path to understanding and accepting what being is. It’s right now. And I tap into that through the only way I know how. 

Meditation. 

And there is my Buddhist connection. 

Now we could open up a whole new can of barracudas on the implications of what that means, but I’ll just sum up what Buddhism means to me and the general thesis of what I understand from my experiences with Buddhism. 

Everything changes. Nothing lasts. Meet the present with acceptance and release your cravings and aversions.  

That’s what I’m trying to do. Or what I’m trying to access. There’s a school of thought that says once you acknowledge and accept the impermanence, you’re instantly transported to the stream of being that flows eternal. But that hasn’t been my experience. I call Buddhism and meditation a practice, because I have to do just that. Practice. 

I have to practice meditation and living by the eightfold path. I have to practice identifying negative, or even positive thought patterns. It’s difficult going against all the ways in which my thought process has been wired over 30+ years of living and interacting with society and all that comes with it. 

I’m trying to get real. 

But I’m not saying I’m somehow more real than anyone else. And if you ever hear me saying that, please take a running soccer kick at my organs of generation. I’m trying to make my reality more real. You can choose to do the same if you wish. It’s your life, and just like Project Mayhem, you choose your own level of involvement. 

Now none of this is original. I’m tying together things I’ve learned and studied and trying to make sense of them. This was a another focal point of Hegel’s theories. Learning from those who came before us, and putting together different ideas that come from different people during different eras to make conclusions

And the sum total of my current conclusion is I want the freedom to live my realist reality by means of accessing the stream of constant that is the present.

Or, as Garth Algar said to Wayne Campbell, “LIVE IN THE NOW!” (4)

(1) - Plato’s Republic. Book 9. (380 BCE) 

(2) - Philosophize this! podcast. Episode 76. Hegel’s God. (2016)

(3) - The Power of Now. Chapter 3. Nothing Exists Outside the Now. (1997) 

(4) - Wayne’s World. (1992) 

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own."

I’ve often heard people utter, in subtle judgment, the phrase “He’s not doing well.” It’s a sentence that covers the gamut of possible failures. Maybe it’s in reference to one’s health. This is the only situation where I give a pass to the phrase, and don’t see the need to further extrapolate on that aspect. 

No, what I’m talking about is a snap judgement a person makes summing up another’s life. A calculation of their state of existence. 

Broken up with a loved one?  

 “He’s not taking it well.”

Driving a car in poor repair?   

“She must not be doing well.”

Making declarations of unfair treatment or venting frustrations using the tool of social media? 

“He seems likes he’s not very doing well.”

It’s a bullshit assessment that I find three major flaws in.

1. You assume you have the ability to calculate the sum total of a person’s current life experience based on the small sliver of it you're exposed to.                                                                                  
2. It’s an obvious comparative defense mechanism. They are not doing well. You have made this assessment. Ergo, you are in a position to contrast “not doing well” because you yourself are “doing well”.                                                                                                                                    
3. It operates under the assumption that there is a clear cut and universally recognized way to function and a status quo of criteria one needs to maintain in their life that implies “well”.

This third point is the one I take most exception with. 

Recently, I came to the realization that what has been a factor in driving my days of depression, has been the erroneous acceptance of an established “well” and my perceived lack of achieving this status. The easiest way to identify the conditions of  this “well” is using the metric of financial means. We can externally measure this based on the materials a person owns. 

I drive a $200 scooter I bought over a year ago. It’s got a busted basket on the front. It recently (somehow) got covered in paint, and it’s generally pretty old and beat up. Now, there are plenty of Americans (I’ll pick on my own here) that might see a picture of me driving that scooter over here and think to themselves “Maybe the pay for a teacher isn’t so high in Taiwan. He doesn’t look like he’s doing that well.” 

And there it is. The sum total of me and my condition of “Well” being based solely on the metric of wealth appraised by my means of transportation. 

This, until my recent epiphany, was a means of embarrassment for me. I let it reflect to myself that I wasn’t doing “well". And I thought about it and thought about it and drank coffee and thought about it and came to the simple and obvious conclusion that that was bullshit. Now here, epiphany might be the wrong (and possibly pretentious) word. It’s more of a remembrance. I never judged others based on their financial status. But hitting my 30’s and still not having much in the way of money, coupled with a lack of direction, and no real clear cut career path, I had started to buy in to the American ideal of what a successful life entails. I was failing to live up to being financial “successful” and was reminded about that every time I got on my scooter. This reflection manifested into negative self-perception, and lended its weight to my predisposition of melancholy and a dislike of self. As a younger man, I thought, I knew, that this was a corrupt way of thinking and utter bullshit. But recently? Well...

I had bought into the bullshit. 

And then, in a slow culmination of memories and experience (and a slower firing of my synapses) I thought of all of the people in true and absolute poverty I had seen over the last 2 years. And the smiles they shared. And they families they had and loved. And the humans they were. Same as me. 

Now, if I  judged myself based on financial accumulations,  ipso facto, I was extending that judgment to these people.  And if I wasn’t “doing well”, then these people…. 

Well, fuck that kind of judgment. 

This same idea extends towards people having to endure non-financial related hardships. 

Years back, I had gone through a pretty rough break up. Immature and pernicious things were said by both parties. My ex chose to vent her frustrations and difficulties on social media. My name was not mentioned, but the harsh feelings and difficult experience she was encountering were in full public display. A few days later, a friend said to me “Yeah man, she’s not doing well.” I read his intonation as expressing pitying bemusement and frank judgement. He had just summed up the girl’s current encompassing life experience by the few sentences she had chosen to share publicly. She was failing to reach the “well” benchmark and was therefore not succeeding, if not failing, at life. 

It made me feel better. I was able to utilize external opinion to reenforce my own petty comparative insecurity and find satisfaction by measuring her “wellness” as inferior to my own. 

More bullshit.

What I’m trying to get at, is that the social standard, the ubiquitous “well” in Western culture is at best a confused idea to make sense of the magnitude of experiencing the great unknown that is life, and at worst, a malevolent construct used to judge, compare, classify, and condemn. 

Be it an other's emotional state, financial means,  mechanisms with which they cope with stress or tragedy, or one's current mental state that you are being exposed to, don’t use the social construct of “well” to judge them. Or yourself.  We all exist in a fluid and ephemeral state. Nothing is permanent, and there is no real natural occurring metric that one needs to set as a standard. I’m not advocating an abdication of responsibility for one’s actions, or the idea to welcome stagnation by never pushing yourself past your current state or means, but if you need to use something with which to measure your current state against, use yourself. Try and be better than who you were yesterday. Try to learn from your history (mistakes and failures are fantastic tools and opportunities to learn how to grow), and be “well” in the sense that you’re better than who you were. 

Then you’ll be doing well.