Coping with Weariness

  Tonight, I had this feeling of being midway on a mountain, and feeling tired from overexertion. I feel like the mountain above me is covered in mist, and I have no idea where my steps will lead me anymore, or if I even have the energy to scale such a precipice. But for a moment, I gave myself permission to feel tired and even to feel sick. And I even started to listen to some chanting in Sanskrit.

   As I was relating in yesterday's group meditation, our society is addicted to the concept of time, keeping time and clocks. Life rarely ever flows according to the clock, at least certainly not the literal clocks that surround us in the form of wristwatches, timers, cellphone clocks, laptop displays etc. In spite of all my efforts to be on time, accomplishing tasks on time, etc. there is still a part of me that has nothing to do with time at all, let alone the chronological sense of it. And I think that it's crucial to touch this eternal present, even if it seems physically inaccessible or impossible. 

   When people feel tired, they might take it as a sign that something is wrong with them. I beg to differ: it may have nothing to do with iron deficiency or Vitamin D loss, etc. Instead, I tend to think of tiredness as arising from the expectation to care. Quite simply, in the age of surplus information, we are expected to care about everything, respond to everything at once, and even have answers to things that are unanswerable. This creates a sense of pressure.

   Actually, pressure is illusory, and the only thing we need to be true to is our own embodiment in this brief world. I can read many books that contain lofty ideas, but if I am unable to feel those ideas in my bones at the end of the day, then they are only indigestible footnotes. Time, responsibility, efficiency, are all words of violence against our bodies and even our souls. These words come from an industrial model of the world --one which assumes that people can be reduced to numbers and even tracked using time-motion studies. People become depressed because it's the body's way of saying "I can't do this anymore", or "this is not who I really can be at the moment". And so in those moments, we need to honor the feeling of weariness and nurture it.

   The soul itself is full of mysteries that will never be fully resolved. From a Buddhist perspective this amounts to emptiness. We are full of infinite possibilities, to the point where there is not a single "I" that controls, let alone oversees, the entire life story. We simply don't know whether we will succeed or fail. This is a scary prospect--one prefers the safety of knowing what they are capable of--but at the same time there is solace in the fact that nobody can take this moment away from me.