One of my teachers1 said the title of this post with great authority, and it gave me pause. How could life be a feeling, I wondered, isn’t life a state of being?
Then it hit me: life can’t be a state of being. Life is even more encompassing than ideas of being and non-being. That is, whoever is having conceptions of these two opposing states, is by definition, living. Those two big ideas happen inside life, not outside of life.
I’ve found myself exploring this, especially since my Zen Buddhist practice landed me – right as this rainy day – smack dab on a middle path between opposite pairs like “life and death.”
I’m not saying “life = feeling” is true, but it is a useful construct for knowing you are alive, and perhaps for deeply appreciating the entire ride of being a human, which means embracing the oddly painful, the confusing, and mysterious, turning a blind eye to those who would subsume your spirit, and acknowledging the oddly calm bits too.
The detached coolness of ‘my’ middle way, means I occasionally find myself cranking up some false drama to gain the energy to even want to make a plan.
This is not my usual style. So I’m not sure a Buddhist approach feels like me.
What style of living feels like you?
Honestly, there’ve been days when I felt like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, going about my day, pushing down the realization revealed at the end of the movie. Is that what is happening to me: waking up, dead? And only a few folks can clue me in because they know from where I’ve come? Hellooo, if so, please send me a high five!
For the longest time, I equated living with a semi-dramatic enactment of my life complete with bold decisions, stories arcs, and stress-filled moments to suffer through and emerge victorious. That’s what I thought was living. A set of sensations that let me know “Life is h a p p e n i n g. Here’s the story of it.”
These days, I don’t feel this like unless I’m huffing and puffing under my weighted vest on a dog walk… Then, along come visceral feelings, not necessarily emotional ones. Unfortunately, caring is one routine state that dropped from the daily, and I find this problematic. Caring is what drove me to do nearly everything I did. It made me feel my work was worthy of my time. Caring made me feel like I was on the right side of right v. wrong too. Like what I did made life better for people, groups of people, and critters too.
But with the middle way, aiming at good seems inappropriate given the approach. Who’s to say what’s “good” anyway? Isn’t that an extreme? An edge on the “good v bad” dichotomy?
True goodness requires another level of understanding, playing out over eons in complicated way.
Any given action can be done with love and great intention, and be received as the opposite. That’s just life. We can’t control that part.
I guess this post is all about the difference between conceptualizing your life and living it. Basically, if you think you are alive, or think you are dead, it doesn’t matter. Both are constructs of mind. But feelings can help you experience more fully whatever it is you are doing.
And all of this happens in the body. So best to get in motion. And do things.
Life simply is, and we can’t objectify it because we are in it. Just like you can’t objectify your own point of view, because you’d need to see yourself from the outside, and be gazing outward from inside yourself, in tandem to do this. This seems impossible given current laws of physics. You can’t get outside yourself, not really, you can only imagine you are doing so.
So what if you’ve spent a lifetime enjoying being a quiet firebrand, gleefully random, loving, curious, learning, changing, and dramatic and also, effective and creative? What if you LOVE to feel alive, wind whipping through your hair, jumping out of airplanes, stomping across hot coals, and getting all sweaty in hot yoga? What if you enjoy moving about groups of people, holding doors open, having conversations and telling stories, and sometimes even swearing?
Oh yeah, those are feelings and interactions. And I’ve chased them with verve.
So sets of sensations became my personal “pursuit of happiness” and my pursuit of “life and liberty” too. When I do these things, I feel alive. That is, I can turn around and see behind me the wake2 of my own actions. And because of that view I can deduce I’m like a ship cutting through water. Yet, I can’t describe the ship exactly. I am the ship, I take up the space of my ship, figurehead and all. I cannot get outside my ship to see the nature of the vessel cutting through the water. As much as I’ve wanted to.
A ship of fools? I sincerely hope not.
So, if I were to ask you about what feelings reveal life to you – what would you say? Would they include exhilaration? Would they mean quiet contemplation? Would they be laughter with friends? How about walking in nature? Surfing? Driving? Sex?
Would it, could it also be, rest?
I ask this in hopes that you can tap into feeling what feels like living to you, and enjoy making some of that happen for yourself today.
Me too. 🙌🏼
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT ;)
- Fisherman and step-dad-like friend to my family, John Kenney Abrams. Movie about his life is here. ↩︎
- Leaving ‘a wake of awakening’ used to be a mantra of mine. Since meeting a teacher with this ability, I’m not so sure anymore that I want to affirm this. It’s a great turn of phrase and all, but maybe not my thing. ↩︎