The Enlightened and the Lonely

Someone could become a millionaire selling a bumper sticker that says:

“If you don’t feel like you’re losing your mind these days, then you’re probably part of the problem.”

Over the past decade things in America just keep getting weirder and nastier. I’d like to blame that on social media and/or our ubiquitous portable communication devices, but I honestly don’t know if I have a leg to stand on with that.

I do know that it is very easy to suspect it is the rest of the world that has gone insane.

Sanity is an odd social construct. If everyone says something is white and one person says: “I honestly don’t know what color it is, but I know that it’s not white…” then everyone figures that one person is insane and has lost their mind.

The same is true if everyone says that something is black and one person says: “I honestly have to tell you that thing is brown, a beautiful brown, but brown nonetheless. Not black.” Everyone, again, will figure that person is not sane and has lost their mind.

The root of the word sanity is the same as the root of sanitary. I try not to think about the psychology of people as a matter of cleanliness or conformity or health, or even sensibility. To me the mind is either connected to reality or it isn’t. I’ve known this since the early 1970s during that fun sort of renaissance in psychology we went through and all the altered states of mind that seemed to be filling up the fruit bowl of life in America the Home of the Brave. But I’ve also grown accustomed to the quiet, lonely feeling I’ve had all these years.

This winter, some fifty years since the 1970s began, I’m very slowly reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s classic manual on meditation called The Miracle of Mindfulness. He’s got sections in this small wonderful book titled, “Washing the dishes to wash the dishes;” “Eating a Tangerine;” “Seeing with the eyes of compassion;” etc. I may well be insane (and unsanitary) but I don’t think I would want to be alive any other way. I can’t really hate other people, and even though my memory is beginning to get slipperier than I’d like, I have always known that you can’t do anything about the world until you’ve done everything about yourself.

Thich Nhat Hanh may or may not say these two things anywhere, but I know they’re true:

1. We’re all screwing up together. There is no me vs. you or us vs. them that is real.
2. What you believe is not the same as what you know.

I’ve never been very good at meditation. It’s very hard to shut your mind down if you are a writer. I probably have a good six to eight personalities carrying on in my head on any given day. I used to think I was in need of psychiatric help. Now I understand they’re mostly characters and voices waiting to be part of a story or to make noise in an essay or poem.

I will likely not finish The Miracle of Mindfulness before this year is over. Near the end of things will be a great and important election here in this country. By then it is likely I will have been institutionalized. The best thing about that will be others just like me who are being institutionalized as well. We shall all say in as many ways as can ever be imagined that we never meant to be a problem. We were just doing our jobs.