I want to follow up on my post of yesterday evening.
I sort of wandered off the path when used the adjectives I did -- 'pointless,' 'meaningless' and 'silly.' I believe it's counterproductive to classify and categorize in that way.
Instead, I guess I would say that most of the things I encounter in everyday life that are important to other people seem not important at all to me. Also, things that seemed important to me in times past seem unimportant now. This may be further evidence of depression, but to me it feels like liberation.
"From the first," Zen patriarch Hui-Neng said, "not a thing is." I can't explain the meaning of that, but I think I understand it intuitively. And having understood it, I have no ability to get worked up about things.
Detachment is my watchword, and I enjoy being detached. I can save my emotional energy for things closer to home.
2 comments:
Mike, I have often been accused of having an almost Martian-like degree of detachment myself at times.
But here's the thing: emotional retrograde is not the same thing as detachment.
Are they the same thing functionally? I don't think so. (I've been wrong before.)
The value judgements any intelligent person makes about the materialistic -- or in the case of we brainiacs the informationalistic (is there such a word? if there isn't, there should be) -- are unavoidable, of course. A rental economy would be much kinder to the earth than an ownership economy, that's for sure.
But you know, we're all sort of flies in the cultural amber. Even you, my friend. Even you.
I have been working on a post about your comment, but I'm not there yet.
I've gotten kind of bored with thinking lately.
Post a Comment