Monday, October 30, 2006

First, do no harm

I'm batting .000 on router repair. I've tried to fix two in the past week. One still doesn't work as it should, and the other is in worse shape than it was before I tinkered with it.

I am again confronted with the reminder that I don't know as much as I like to think I know. People ask me to fix something, and my ego and my codependency-related inability to say 'no' to requests lead me to make my friends' lives marginally less pleasant than they were before I 'helped.'

I'm still working on "'don't know' mind," but I've pretty much mastered "'don't know jack shit' mind."

I spent most of Sunday alone, running errands and doing housework. Trips to Target and Homeland and PetSmart and Borders. Plus a half-hour on the phone trying to talk someone through undoing what I'd done to a router. A lot of this busyness is just to keep the depression at bay. Some meditation teachers suggest that we should sit with our depression and work with it. But others say -- I think this is really important to note -- that depression can actually be amplified by meditation.

Back around 1998-99, when my life went pretty much completely to hell, I reached a point where I could not be alone for more than 48 hours. I had no friends at all at that time, and when my days off from work rolled around each week (on Monday and Tuesday, as I recall), I would be sitting in my apartment with a white-knuckled grip on the arms of my chair, literally trying to avoid killing myself while I was completely alone with my thoughts for two days.

I have gotten so used to being busy socially over the past few months -- and having constant distraction from my depression -- that I had almost forgotten it was there.

But in the final analysis, the depression owns me, or at least a large part of me. I could go back on some drug to alter the chemistry of my brain, but that wouldn't address the larger cosmic question of whether I ought to be depressed. My track record as a useful individual isn't very good and my track record as a wise or knowledgeable person is even worse. Who wouldn't be depressed if they had been as big a flop as a human being as I've been.

(And yet, here's the rub: I don't think I would have it any other way. I can't imagine myself being a cheerful, successful, heartbreakingly handsome overachieving American. I would be even more miserable than I am now.)

I have at least one friend who has taken the Buddhist bodhisattva vow: to delay nirvana and keep coming back, life after life, until all beings have been enlightened.

That, at least, I could recognize as beyond my ken. Yeah, I'm going to enlighten all beings. Jesus. I might as well take a vow to be an NFL quarterback.

My vow is to keep coming back until every wi-fi router on earth is fucked up. That's something I have some reasonable expectation of accomplishing.

4 comments:

Lark said...

I'm sorry it's so hard sometimes. I think there are many criteria by which you would not be considered a failure as a human, wifi routers not withstanding.

Anonymous said...

Wish you were here in Vienna.

We'd figure out some kinda way to go nuts.

Anonymous said...

Hmmmm...

Too bad we don't live closer -- this is material for a conversation, not a drive-by posting.

I will say this: when you've had the kind of painful childhood that you had (& that I had too), psychic pain kind of becomes... your friend. That is, we have this subconscious drive to preserve the vision of the world we developed as children and it would threaten our psychic integrity somehow if the world did not turn out to be a painful place. We're attached to the pain; we may be persuaded to numb it (antidepressants) but we don't want to be separated from it (lifestyle changes that might conceivably make us happy.)

Depression is a disease, we tell our friends. Like diabetes.

And that's not totally off-base. Diabetes is another disease that has a huge lifestyle component and whose incidence world-wide seems to depend a lot upon whether you live in an industrialized nation.

Honestly? I think it's a trick of the inner lighting. Abraham Lincoln said it best: "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

Nina said...

Just don't touch my wifi, okay?

= )

I got a sweet deal going by giving my neighbor access and spliting my internet bill. I'm wondering how many others down the street may be interested in this split as well. I might acutally could make money.

svaeunzv