musing – Page 12 – Greg Blee

Mess with my life!

Okay, so you screwed up your life good; now screw around with mine!

Give me your best advice by adding your comments below. Here’s an evolving list of the options i’m actively considering, in the order they popped into my head. Which should it be?

Move to Tofino and revive the Beat movement.
Return to Ucluelet and run for council in November.
Move to Victoria and take a masters degree in some facet of Environmental Studies.
Buy a small sailboat (like this) and do the “Walden Pond” thing for a year, up and down the coast.
Enter a Zen Buddhist monastery.
Buy a large sailboat and take groups out on it as a kind of floating retreat.
Move back to the West Coast and work as a kayak guide.
Find a good woman, settle down, and dedicate my life to making her happy.
Secure cheap living somewhere and make a concerted effort at writing for a living.
Go back to school and do a couple of exploratory years toward an undergrad degree.
Build a tiny cabin in the woods and do a “Walden Pond” for a year.
Go volunteer for a year in Africa.

End of the World

Caroline (possibly in the grip of a toxic-work-environment funk) emails: “Would you think me mad if I suggested that I think it is possible this is the end of the world?”

I tend to agree, with provisos. Not the end of the world, which will continue on as though nothing happened, or even of life, which seems to be remarkably tenacious. Even humankind will survive in some way, probably much reduced in circumstance. I’ve said several times in the past while that we may well be living at the all-time apex of human civilization. In other words, it’s downhill from here.

Several scientists — those cold-bloodedly objective appraisers of reality-as-it-is (ha-ha, i’m being ironic) — seem to agree. No less than James Lovelock, of Gaia hypothesis fame, predicts in this broadcast from CBC Ideas‘ excellent “How to Think About Science” series, that less that 80% of humanity will survive the end of THIS century. That’s sobering, but part of me says “Good, we’re not fit to inherit the earth just yet.”

In less dark moments, though, i think our present state of crisis is exactly what we need to smarten us up en masse. I’m certainly not going to give up trying, in my own small way. To the contrary, strangely: I am energized: recycling, living small and local and carbon-reduced, minimizing my monetary impact, moving toward an alternate, less destructive mode of being, etc. That at least is good for my soul, and maybe that’s all we can ultimately do. “We all want to change the world,” says the Beatles’ song Revolution, but really the most we can do (counter the sages) is change ourselves. On with it!

Yours in grim, chuckling hope,

~Greg

Thoughts for tonight

From Zen and the Beat Way (Alan Watts):

Agriculture and industrialism … have created a glut of material goods and a great poverty of time. Most people have a way of life devoid of everything except maintaining and servicing their material existence 12 to 14 hours every day. In contrast, the Aborigines [spent] 12 to 14 hours a day in cultural pursuit. (quoting Robert Lawlor‘s 1990 book on Australian Aboriginal culture, Voices of the First Day).

Imagine what your life would be like if you spent 12-14 hours a day in “cultural pursuit,” i.e. meaningful activity — the stuff you do when you consider you’re having fun. Come to think of it, rich people do have that opportunity, and on the whole they don’t seem to make much of it. Without a wide cultural context, maybe it’s impossible. But i want to give it a try.

One more:

[In] essence, mystical experience and ecological awareness [are] simply two ways of talking about the same experience.

That is a profound statement — one i find suffused with hope, in that “ecological awareness” is starting to make deep sense to people in the West.

FEY DREAMS

Odd dreams last night, involving organized gangs. The gang leader, a courteous, grey-haired gentleman, wanted me to do some work for him, but i played coy because i was already working in some unspecified but shady capacity with a competing gang. He was starting to put pressure on me, though nobody actually said “drive-by shooting” out loud….

In the dream i prided myself on my transparency — no hidden agenda. (I think that’s a good thing in real life, too.) So I did something incredibly foolish: in the gang leader’s living room, on the gang leader’s giant-screen TV, i composed an email to my own gang, hinting that we might want to see to it that the gang leader “have an accident.”

One of the GL’s henchmen — played in the dream by Dan Ackroyd — accidentally saw the email, of course, and i spent the rest of the dream (and the night) nervously concocting explanations for the GL, most along the lines of “Maybe good, maybe bad” — the Buddhist tenet of nonjudgment that says we can never really know the true consequences of our actions in this infinitely interconnected world. But i was looking over my shoulder the whole time.

Gangs? Violence? Is the zeitgeist of the city seeping into me already? Funny how a dream like that can taint the whole next day.

I note with judgmental dismay that my nagging cough is still with me. Maybe good, maybe bad.

[Postscript: Trenchant and amusing dream interpretation in comments below.]

BUMBLING

We must learn to be flexible … to perceive the ever-changing world as it is and react to it as such, even (or especially) when it does not measure up to our thoughts and plans for it. UBC was not to be today as I hooked up with old friend Erica later than planned. We had beverage at Turks, then spent about two hours on the grass in the sun in Grandview Park, catching up on nearly ten years apart. She’s one of those rare people with whom that doesn’t feel weird at all. Lotsa frank Zen/Buddhism talk — she’s a Taoist, which doesn’t mean a heck of a lot to me but apparently puts a “coming to the world” spin on basic Zen. Crap, i can’t decide what to have for lunch; how am i ever going to figure out what principles to live by?

Erica, she’s slowly coming round to making a virtue of what she calls “bumbling” — her word for trying out one thing after another, without (in the “householder” sense) sticking with any of it. (Though as she herself admits, three university degrees, plus a couple of diplomas in alternative healing techniques, kind of belie the not-sticking-with aspect.) She used to think of bumbling as kind of a soft form of failure, but now she’s looking at it more as a choice and a way of living.

Like me, Erica has accumulated little material wealth to show for her efforts. So we consoled ourselves somewhat by counting our immaterial accomplishments. I tried to take a picture but the camera battery died.

Later, in the wet dreams department:

I discovered a nifty “subnotebook” the size and weight of a hardcover book, for a paltry $400. I’m tempted, i must say. Computer access is highly addictive, especially once you realize that almost every cafe on the Drive has free wireless. I could spend a lot of time in cafes like that.
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I went into Bikes on the Drive and test rode this Dahon folding bike. I’ve known about them for a long time but never had the chance to try one. It rode well — a bit flexible and a bit cramped, but overall very satisfactory as basic transpo. And nicely designed, too.

Plans for tomorrow: dinner for four at a noodle joint and then the KRAZY anime exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery (it’s cheap Thursday). Rob helped install part of the exhibit, so we’ll get the (over-)guided tour.

Oh, and a rule i plan on sticking with (until i break it): Once it’s in the blog, no editing allowed. Sorry, all you perfectionists.

PORTC (Probability of Returning To Coast) factor today: LOW