Monday, March 13: Why the rush? Why so much effort?

WHY THE RUSH? WHY FORCEFUL?
It’s fun to be in a body. It’s fun to run and skip and dance and fool around. Especially with our lives so indoors and sedentary, just to get outside and takes a brisk stroll is a great pleasure, and in these constrained and over commercialized times, almost a necessity.

Now, nature and love. These seem to me the requirements for a sweet and good life. The now of breath, the now of sensing, the now of feeling what we feel and seeing what we see and hearing what we hearing and moving. The nature of moving and the now of moving. If we didn’t move we’d be rocks, or dead, but as living beings, even to drag a pathetic self from bed to couch to watch TV, some movement needs to take place.

Love is loving what you love, the flowers or the clouds or your partner, or the way it feels to walk briskly and smoothly on a beautiful day. Love is listening to someone talk and being thrilled just to hear their voice, which requires either having just fallen in love or being present.

And then the title question: why the rush? In our times of neglecting our physical reality, people like to go out and trash around, in mindless yoga, or mindless noisy exercise classes, or at the gym, pumping away on some machine to loud rock music. If the muscles burn we must be alive, right?

Well, sort of, but how about this: moving slowly enough so we can really feel who and how we are just now? To move slowly is to give ourselves the opportunity to learn something new. If we go fast, we have to go in our habitual way. If we want to dress quickly or walk down the block in a hurry, we can go our habitual way. But to learn a new way of moving, we have to slow down enough to bring what usually isn’t in awareness, into our awareness.

Same with effort. If we are trying and straining and efforting, our attention is on our effort and our grunting and groaning and our masochistic pleasure in hurting ourselves and living up to the absurd, “no pain, no gain” motto. With a reduction of effort, again we can return to reality, to awareness, to noticing what’s actually happening. We can feel ourselves in the sensing meaning and the feeling meaning. We can be here and we can be open to trying something new. Some variation that might be an improvement, if not at least a novelty.

Which is to say, if we slow down and reduce effort, we can become present centered learners again, as we were when we were young geniuses as babies. This is a very nice state.