Stop and Shift Gears

I stopped writing again a couple of weeks ago. My blogs were centering on gripes about politics and not as refined as many comments out there. I ain't no Leonard Pitts, Jr. I don't like just spewing bile. There's a lot more to life, and a lot of more interesting and wonderful stuff.

Watching The Pianist while snowed in recently, I was imagining what it was like to be in a concentration camp. There are all kinds of horrific images possible. But then an unbidden fantasy blew into me, quite unlike anything I would have chosen given the subject. Still in the setting of a concentration camp, this time I imagined being relieved of the slavery of possessions, the necessity to work for a living, and the cultivation of image. Absent these things I would be free to do and be whatever I liked. In the fantasy I elected to no longer speak, and would merely go about looking for helpful things to do for people, from silly little things to hard labor, with no expectation of payment. Somewhere inside it seems that this is what most religions would like for us to do, and which we find so hard to follow because we're invested in our image and industry. What a difference the experience of a concentration camp would be with this attitude! I would even be silently charitable to my captors.

Many years ago, first introduced to the Tao Te Ching, I thought that to follow its tenets would make one look insane to the general public. I quit studying and trying to follow it after a while out of fear for this. A few years passed and the book came off the shelf again. Now, after a quarter century of study and inner work, I find that the closer I follow the Tao the less it is obvious to others. The benefit is all inside: without intending it one becomes more and more powerful. It is the dragon hidden in plain sight. Paradoxically, though others don't seem to see it (how can you recognize something you've not been trained to see?), because I cultivate the qualities of balance, flow of energy, nonaction, the pursuit of potential, and virtue, my being around others affects them in ways they likewise fail to see.

I sometimes wonder if this is why I have trouble getting a second date. They sense something about me that scares them (the unknown is one of our strongest fears, for we don't know if or how we will be able to handle something when we don't know what we're facing; this is complicated when we haven't been taught to trust our inner strength in the first place). What a fond thought, to run across a woman who finds no reason to fear me!

Perhaps I dislike my griping because blame is fouled water that merely sits and stinks. But cutting gemstones, even though it requires much patience, is indescribably satisfying because it results in beauty that few will protest. So even though my passion and trained insight will forever inform me about political actors, maybe I need to just observe them, sharpen my beliefs, then let them go play their games as they will. And I will play the piano and cut gemstones, and love my daughter.