A Hopeless Joy

   From interdependence--the sense that there is no self that is separate--comes the courage to let go and "just be". This comes even in the worst moments or when one is not feeling in control even of one's own body, much less one's destination. 

     But there is a trick to this that is so hard to understand and I think only a few did (Colin Wilson, Gurdjieff etc.). The trick is that we need to just keep walking even when there is no longer ground under our feet--no longer the assurance or the hope that what we do even means anything in the end. This is often achieved only when we have overcome the attachment to tiredness, boredom, exhaustion, which we mistakenly take to be a limit to ourselves--the snake that lies dormant at the end of the world, waiting to swallow us whole.

   This, to me, is the essence of the vow and it's what distinguishes a vow from something that is impelled, compulsory or somehow done with a specific motivation in mind. Nathalie Goldberg perhaps put it best in her advice to writers that they should "keep moving the hand" even when what they are writing seems nonsensical or even antithetical to their familiar sense of self. This is because it is only by doing this that we can go beyond the confines of the familiar, habitual and comforting sense of "I" to embrace a more uncertain yet certainly generative relationship to things. I can only truly create when I trust my hand (and heart, essentially) to guide "me", even when this very "me" has exhausted itself. And in fact, we can practice flexing the muscle of walking into uncertainty through the simple process of free-writing without the beginning, middle or end. This is spontaneity at its finest, but the goal s to finally get the point where we are no longer attached to hope, and we can function just as well without it.