This Is It
I’ve said it before: relaxation is not my strong suit, especially in settings with “resort and spa” in the title. Upscale hotels inspire a special breed of existential anxiety… cocktail umbrellas can’t quite conceal the omnipresent structural violence.
But there I was, on Florida’s Gold Coast last April, pancaked alongside 30-something groomsmen recovering from an engagement party.
When one mentioned feeling a bit stuck in life, I perked up on my chaise lounge and began my usual routine of distracting from my own anxiety by attempting to fix others’.
After he demonstrated sufficient awareness of childhood wounding, I turned to my other diagnostic catch-all.
“Do you believe in a higher power?” I asked.
“Eh,” the philosophy major responded. “I’m more or less an atheist.”
“Perfect!” I thought. “An inroad.” But before I could change this man’s life, he changed mine by reciting his favorite Buddhist meditation.
I’m of the nature to grow old.
I’m of the nature to get sick.
I’m of the nature to lose people I love.
I’m of the nature to die.
So how, then, shall I live?
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I’ve been contemplating these “Five Remembrances” in recent days while listening to a book chronicling the rise of (and future) of OpenAI. The remarks are a useful grounding device when I’m spiraling about uncontrollable superintelligence – especially when it’s powered by fossil fuels after the Big Beautiful Bill dismantled clean energy subsidies. Rude.
The question becomes: in the instance I can’t discuss God and developmental trauma with our technological and political overlords, how, then, shall I live? What can I do in my day-to-day life to tolerate the transience and uncertainty at the core of human existence?
Taking a page from the famed Viktor Frankl playbook of choosing one’s response to circumstances beyond one’s control, I’ve been working on a general posture – a way of being. It’s crystallizing into three components:
Self-Acceptance: At the risk of sounding cringe and/or self-indulgent, I’ve been doing some serious reprogramming of the “I am okay just as I am” variety. Ideally, a secure foundation will allow me to cease hypervigilant fixation with others’ opinions and provide space to simply be.
Presence: As it happens, be-ing involves nonjudgmental awareness of physical sensations. This takes practice and gradual expansion of one’s window of tolerance for bodily stimulation. In support of this mission, I’m exploring a Mat Pilates instructor certification to deepen my body awareness and understanding of anatomy.
Openness: This one’s the hardest – the willingness to let go of outcomes and be touched by life. Or, as a poem once put it: Have the courage to listen. To receive. To let your heart be broken. To feel. To fall in love. Have the courage to get ruined for life.
Despite the terror and inconvenience involved in embracing psychological adulthood, I am (when I remember) consciously choosing this posture. And when I forget or fall short, life is fortunately forcing it upon me.
For months, Alan Watts’ This Is It: And Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience has sat unread upon my nightstand, taunting me. I’ve been hesitant to wade into its Eastern embrace, as I suspect Watts might be right about his titular conclusion. In one essay, he describes a “vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is.”
If one accepts this premise, the only logical response to existential risk is presence – “to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.”
It hurts! I don’t wanna embrace reality – to accept that I will grow old and face loss and eventually die! Though I suspect it is the way. Nature always bats last, after all.
Fortunately, I’ll have ample opportunity to practice these principles. I embark tonight on a weeklong beach vacation with my family.
Wish me luck out there on my chaise lounge! Or at the very least, wish me presence.
