Se Habla Nirvana?

(Just ignore the Spanish, okay? We are not here to judge the voice, merely to record.)

Rebecca Traister in Salon: “Psychologist Steven Hayes says the American obsession with feeling good is preventing us from living good—and that living life to the fullest means a lot of pain.”

Quite an eye-grabber. So it turns out this ... this guy has published this book, and I am like, Whoa! You couldn't have done this a teensy bit sooner? Like, I had to slog through all those years by myself?

Alright, not entirely true. But I was forced to learn—alright, dragged kicking and screaming—by that most god-awful of qualities, an unrelentingly painful (is that a word? it is now) condition. Driven to find a better inner life, only it felt whole lot more like driven crazy, so I also had to find a way to bless that.

(Honestly, is there no end to this woman's nobility.)

Hayes: “ ... values require definitions, because there's not a lot in the culture about values. But it's not just a matter of redefinition, it's about changing the game. The natural game most of us are in is how to feel good. That's not the same thing as how to live good.”

I ask you. Do you think this is fair? That Hayes should be Amazon number seventy-three and climbing, while someone too whipped to send off her book because she has already lived his fucking book ...Gee, this kind of thing gets unseemly real quick, doesn't it.

Rebecca Traister is one of the terrific writers at Salon, and Tim Grieves, and Gary Kamiya, don't get me started on Gary Kamiya.

I must admit, this guy Hayes gets impressively bizzy: Just Do It You Big Sissy. Destroyer of lives.

But the path that feels in truth like you have a good life, like you are good. Which is, after all, all anyone wants. (It is? He hasn't met—never mind.) There is this little tiny fork in the mind, exactly like my grandson's Thomas the Tank, where the little train of thought can travel down the bitch-funny track, i.e. love, or the bitch-screw-you track, (which upsets the stomach) depending on how the switch is set.

What I've found is that easing back, in some way that is hard to describe, allows the switches to set themselves on, really, the more happy-making path.

Oh, wait. Maybe this is what Hayes means, duh. When he writes of our pain and crap. That instead of JDIYBS and blowing it off by hurting someone else, someone smaller, one can “carry all that forward down a path that that is neither indulgence nor suppression.”

(And I don't want to hear from any Middle Way know-it-alls, okay? Let the man speak.)

(Note to self: Will you shut up.)

“What they tell me are things like, ‘I want to contribute to other people’ and ‘I want to be a loving person.’ By saying it, you're connecting to it. But it's hard. Because [once you acknowledge it] you know it is not bullshit, and that it's not something you can ever stop doing. If you say that your values are being a loving person, do you ever get to say, ‘That's done!’ No. A value is like a direction, like going west. No matter how far west you go, you can still keep going west.”

I'm glad he mentioned that part. The icky, dark side of right life: it never ends. However. This is the single most powerful illusion, the maya that lays like a filmy, choking veil over all of life. I don't know why it has to be this way, why we just can't have life sweet and pure, why it is not simply ours, at birth.

Why, instead, we are given this task, which is to somehow find a way, in the course of life, to penetrate the illusory meaning of ... well, of task itself. To find, at the price of health and years, the real meaning of the work.

All I can tell you is, I wouldn't have designed it that way.

But, as per usual, nobody asked me.