Mini manifesto

I wrote to my scarily suicidal young client this:

Another day, another dollar. And more. Please please please, see beyond family to your own self, adventures, new coffee shops, the bat bridge in Austin, Texas, the "whitest sand beach in the world" (past winner) of Siesta Key, Florida, Baltimore crab cakes, mountain retreats (my old friend Al), Kripalu (https://kripalu.org/), Royal Gorge (http://royalgorgebridge.com/) in little Canon City, Colorado. And the ever exotic Etc. Must take steps.

Writing that, I realized that I rarely attend to, feel the good things in the world anymore. That would be a matter of “dropping” the self and being jazzed by big juicy things out there, with utter relax in one’s gut and chest. For me, it’s very hard to do. I have tremendous debt and little power, and chaining-down obligations. But the essential error is falling into the musty cell of self-consciousness, which is where I think most people are in their middle-and-beyond years, be they “intellectual” or not. Can we get back into the world for a few minutes? Can we do it thematically – a sea-change in our approach – where now we’re back to where we are supposed to be: connected to life by our eyes, not by our folded-back-in-on-itself mind?

This is just a question to myself, to which I don’t have the answer now. I do know it’s the best way to live. And that as long as you stay out of a real prison cell, it shouldn’t be impossible. Most all of us embody injuries that – as psychic ones do – warp our spirit and paint it “condemned” in ineradicable ways. But we’re not just that. Somehow, we can be both trapped in our self and live beyond it. That’s the birthright which is always there, an irreducible kernel from our beginning.