Going for gold

Fact: I've declared myself a Buddhist; yet I've also declared myself willing and eager to find a voice and a vision for Canada, which is a worldly attachment if I've ever heard one.

Fact: I love hockey, and I'll be cheering fervently for our hockey teams in Torino, yet I despise patriotism as an ego trip and distrust nationalism as a recent historical invention and a threat to global peace.

Does this pair of facts add up to nothing more than a paradox?

How can I sit in my little house in my little neighbourhood, among the little Buddhas, on a big couch looking at a big TV with a big red maple leaf on my t-shirt and a beer in my hand, yelling "GO CANADA!"?

I think the answer, if there is one, has to do with two aspects of my character, the observing self and the active self. My active self is a warrior. That guy gets involved. He wades in, fists flying, willing to shed blood if necessary, to fight for the cause, to be engaged and alive. He's a vehicle-driving, hammer-swinging, guitar-playing, canoe-paddling, woman-loving, Canadian human doing, and he is a force to be reckoned with, for a while, anyway.

My observing self, by contrast, simply watches him go. My observing self can see the limits of this so-called man of the so-called world. He knows he's bound to fall, bound to fail, bound to die. He's got a tragic flaw: He's human. He's going down. But let's not let that spoil our day.

Buddhism is my acknowledgement of the observing self, the way I honour the dispassionate, equanimous elder growing within. In the end we leave all this stuff behind, and I'd like to diminish the suffering of attachment along the way. That's shaman talk.

Canada is the skin my warrior lives in. It's a style, a statement, an involvement, a cultural investment. So long as I am engaged in being an individual in a specific set of circumstances, I choose this one, and I choose it with the passion and energy of a hockey player. That's warrior talk.

Perhaps all dichotomies are false. The warrior, like the observer, lives by a code. Is the cause more important than the code? No. It is better to lose with honour than to win by cheating. And the enemy is to be respected, and the influence of good fortune to be acknowledged, and the transience of all things to be remembered. Truly, the glory belongs to God. In the struggles we all face in our own mighty and mini quests, what is really golden is the effort, not the prize.

So if you hear me shouting "Go CANADA!", it's just both my selves in harmony, hoping fervently (and dispassionately) for gold.

Curse/blessing

My mind is a variable thing.

I suppose everyone's mind is. But at a certain point in my life, I wilfully took up the practice of observing myself, even to the point of observing my changing perceptions as they shift with the currents of my life. I have not been able to establish any greater stability by doing that, but at least I can watch myself wobble all over the place.

Right now I'm in a clarity phase. I've eliminated a lot of bad habits and stepped up some good ones, and the result has been to feel like I'm seeing a lot of things really clearly. It's a treat.
Except for one thing: seeing life really clearly isn't exactly cheery most of the time. To look squarely at things as I understand them is to look deep into a terrifying abyss. And that's the trouble.

Based on the facts, there's really only one way out of the human condition: to believe in something. If you believe in something, then it's not the facts, but the story that matters. But the fact is, you can never prove that believing in something works - except by going ahead and believing in it.

The curse/blessing of the post-modern man is to have too many things to believe in, and too many reasons not to believe at all.

Me, myself and I

I'll start this post by saying I'm aware of Freud's theory of the Ego, the Superego and the Id, but it's been a really long time since I've read it and I'm not drawing on it consciously here.

But I have been spending a lot of time figuring out me, myself and I. Lately I've come to believe that these are separate, if overlapping and interdependent parts of the person I am. It's a semantic challenge to talk about, but it goes like this:

Me is the plain human male, seeking the plain human things of this world - food, sex, warmth, heat, gasoline, Blue Rodeo albums, a digital camera, and something from Ikea to keep my shoes tidy. Me is dumb, but decent enough, mostly, and his motivations are clear. Yes, he thinks about women all the time. Yes, he barbeques inordinately often. Yes , he builds stuff compulsively and drives all over the place marking territory. But that's me.

Myself, on the other hand, is completely interior. I don't think anyone but me knows him, and me mostly hates him. Myself is like a dark echo, some kind of ghost in the machine that was generated when me became aware of me. That's typical of me, to go and invent a bogeyman and then not be able to get away from the little bastard. Stupid me for doing that; I get the sense it's my own fault myself is a jerk.

Then there's I. I can see me, watch me and even love me, for all my shortcomings. I can stay calm and silent in the face of all that distresses me. I even can give a stern lecture to myself, and it's occasionally pretty effective. I'm eternal. I'm at peace. I'm in tune.

Now, if only me and myself could quit the endless questing and questioning, I could get on with my life.

4 steps to conflict resolution

I read this somewhere:



Show up

Pay attention

Tell the truth

Remain unattached to the results



I try to do that. It's harder than it seems, especially the last one.