Breath In, Breath Out; It is not as Simple as we Would Want it to Be.

“One of the disadvantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency to see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless...”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

 

Intellectual pursuit need not be dry and sleep inducing.  Just because rigor and logic are applied to the matters of the world, to the matters of life, does not mean that we cannot just simply experience things that bring joy and delight.  We are capable of duality.  When we see sunlight falling through the trees in a park onto a grassy clearing, we can joyfully experience it as a green space of solitude and warmth.  We can purely see a place to set out a blanket on the ground and to open a picnic basket.

 

We don’t have to see a question of why the trees were located there and whether their roots give off chemicals to prevents other trees from growing between them.  We don’t have to speculate of the genus and species of the grass and why it flourishes in this copse of trees.  We don’t have to think about the carbon/oxygen transition ratio that the trees engage in and whether they in a day take care of our carbon footprint.  Some days are days for analysis and some days are just for sitting down with cold fried chicken on an old blanket. Some days are just for drinking a glass of wine.

 

In my life I have known people who analyze everything including how you say hello to them.  You remember the old stand up bit don’t you where in call and response fashion the comedian says, “Good morning, eh?”.  He then adopts another voice and says, “What do you mean by that?” Sometimes such people just seem lost in an internal chess game that will not end until they die.

 

On the other hand, I have known people who smoked pot, drank beer and slept around until their bodies gave out.  These were good people, nice people but people for whom the phrase, “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends,” was a mantra. These lives were lived in just a shallow and meaningless manner as that of those who over intellectualize.

 

Life requires balance sometimes one must do the hard-cold math.  Other times one must accept and simply be without opinion or judgment. Book learning is fine and gives us the tools to live in organized society, a group of people fighting for higher achievement and freedom from the vagaries of nature’s randomness. But simply being in place in the world is required too.  The issue will always remain how to balance both.  Extremes either way can create a shallow and hollow place of being.