I recently participated in a thirty day challenge on instagram.
I’d normally roll my eyes at such a thing. 30 day challenges feel gimmicky. They reek of the way (global) Americans turn philosophy into self-help.
But we’re hardly living in a normal time.
All of my recent writing is an attempt to articulate the subtle. I’m trying the vastness of the hardly glimpsed. It’s enormous. I want to explore the unspoken. I mean the chosen or forced unspoken, yes, but I also mean the unrealized, subconscious metrics of memory and assumption.
I mean the blues and the greens, mathematics and illogic, superstition and trauma, our gawping childhood and developmental patterns. I mean subliminal social contracts and the way social contracts break leaving trash in the ditches. I want to write about the developmental patterns of suck and swallow and coo and wail, let alone crawl and walk and reach and grasp, and the ghosty but portent personal iconography, psychogeographies, and inheritance of family and cultural beliefs. We have cognitive biases and an unrealized private architecture we tend to call reality but is in fact just the house you grew up in.
Reality is nothing like the house you grew up in. The house you grew up in is just the beginning of your Reality.
Maybe I’m doing this because we’re all suddenly self-aware in a way that feels embarrassing. Maybe I get a little pissy at recent collective and cultural awakenings. Good job, kiddo, I want to say.
I don’t say that. I haven’t said anything. The world is already too hot and too mean.
“Please be careful,” I posted on instagram. Be wary. Think as you read the news; recognize your own turbulent feelings; do not turn other people’s lives into your own parade, which denies their humanity and makes a caricature of your own. Be cautious of social media. Remember how riotious and triggery these platforms are to our nervous system. It can make us feel better to post, share, click, comment, watch and watch again, but only for a moment, and often at a cost. I know it can be hard to shift our gaze away. I know our hands, our pulse, and our breath inevitably follow our eyes.
“Be careful,” I said.
Here is the startled naked expression of old pain. We’re seeing scars aching in the dark like phosphorous. Time warps and history is present. Our variegated politicized identities are exposed, vulnerable, and reinjured. I saw and felt the need to lament, scream, or sorrow. I recognized the desperate urge to signal allegiances. I saw the way people’s online presence mutated to badges of honor or a pained, awkward, heavy responsibility. I saw skeletons come out of the closet and old hatred roil. A whole generation of folks came to political consciousness and are playing with it, believing it to be, fire.
While all of these things are real, the kids are in fact playing with fire, I worry about pain-as-purpose, or rage-as-policy, and vengeful intolerance.
I wasn’t arguing for silence. I wasn’t arguing for neutrality. I wasn’t suggesting and do not believe a military turned against children is politic, or even “war”. Our conscience has been startled. I don’t think occupation, apartheid, or settler states are such “nuanced” issues we should wait or bite our tongues or recognize our incompetence. No. I just saw - we all saw - everything light up with hatred. Our pain was leveraged like in a grade school fight: I was here first! who’s side are you on? Aren’t you angry? Don’t you care?
I’m not trivializing this. Who we are - financially, in terms or shades of gender, our queerness, how we have been racialized, politicized, radicalized; mothers, teachers, grievers, citizens, immigrant and native; faith or faithless, consumers and producers, oppressor and oppressed, colonized and colonizer - is attacked and weaponized, weaponized and then re-attacked. I too, feel desperate and afraid. I too feel enormous sadness, physical sorrow, and a smokey, acrid, old anger.
And that’s why, when I saw my friend Jules co-hosting a thirty day instagram challenge, I joined.
I know that strong aversion is a call for attention.
It’s become popular to say that yoga is social justice. I’ve started to resent this. Bear with me; I know that fifteen years ago this was a thing I myself said, over and over again, and tried my best to live. Maybe it’s the sour punk and dour aesthete in me, thinking once a thing has become popular and commodified it has lost its soul, but I don’t say it anymore. If anything, I cock my eyebrow. I want to say, define your terms, sir.
There’s a slip of the tongue I don’t like about it. There is a false equivalency in there somewhere.
If we say yoga is social justice, it becomes easy to think we’re good people because we meditate. Absolved good people. It’s the same as responding to crisis with hopes and prayers. It’s gaslighty and insulting. It tends to make the yogi feel better while abandoning - if not completely repressing - the reality of suffering. It denies the reality of the suffering world. But it also represses- or sublimates, or projects, or spiritualizes - our own.
As it has become so popular to say yoga is social justice, a shaming atmosphere has seeped in. People abandon actual yoga practice because they think yoga is life, or protesting, or identity. This tends toward a cyclic, chest stabbing, shattered ongoingness. We become pinballs.
Maybe it’s the addict in me, but I know the futility of constant crisis. I know it feels like running towards. It’s so visceral. It feels valiant. It feels deliciously righteous. It is intense and it feels personal, intimate, vital.
It feels like love, in other words.
But it’s often selfish.