Well-meaning adults, eager to engage in placid small talk with a generation that most of them completely fail to comprehend, relentlessly beleaguer high school and college graduates with some variation on the question, “So, what are you going to be?”, as though whatever occupation they engage in next will define the shape of their character. A couple of my friends, well aware that they were leaving the comfortably numbing routine of the classroom for the chaotically swirling miasma of the cosmos at large, took to answering that particular inquisition with a list of what they ate for breakfast that morning. They had no illusions about the unpredictability of the future and the mutability of their own natures.
By that point, of course, we had all had some practice fielding that nonsensical question. Our high school guidance counselors descended on us during our sixteenth year with omens of a prosperous future that would pass the lot of us by if we didn't figure out our plan of attack right then and there. And long before that, condescending tall people got down on one knee to address our five-year-old selves, garnering puh-ractical answers to the insidious question in the vein of “astronaut”, “ninja”, and “dinosaur.”
My anarchic associates and I were not repulsed the repetition of the question (although it certainly doesn't help matters). If redundancy were our hot button, we would have degenerated into frothy-mouthed madness long ago at endless requests for our names, credit cards, and lighters. No, what rolls our eyes, shakes our heads, and bites our tongues is the preposterous notion that our identities can be defined and solidified. The timing couldn't be worse. After several years of changing voices, growing pains, swinging moods, emerging pubic foliage, and swelling breasts, the idea that our beings are static is a blatant contradiction of the boggling metamorphoses from which we have just emerged. I've heard it said that “change is the only constant,” and I'm inclined to agree.
However, the majority of our peers had the opposite reaction. Alarmed by the relentless upheaval of adolescence, many young people dive eagerly at the promise of stability. In an environment of continuous fluctuation, the conscious mind must remain constantly alert. For those humans disinclined towards perpetual effort, the cons outweigh the pros; our perennial novelty is their tedious hassle. The fewer variables that muck up the equation, the happier these individuals become. The same youths adamantly declaring themselves future architects or software programmers grow into the well-meaning middle-aged interrogaters who once gently cajoled their juvenile selves towards a stable, easily classifiable identity. Where they were previously content to cram their rambunctious natures into rigid personas, now they turn the same obsessively organizing, pattern-seeking mechanism on the rising generation. They seek a word – just one word, any word will do – to which they can attach the being before them, a taxonomical tag ensuring easy filing in their mnemonic catalog.
Several months ago, I attended a lecture given by a New Mexico-based American-born Ayurvedic doctor, in a room full of wide-eyed young hippies and solemnly serious old new agers. The bulk of the rambling, hour-long lecture can easily be condensed into a small list of bullet points:
1.You don't get it.
2.You're in the desert, so drink lots of water.
3.Death is just around the corner, so find your dharma and stick to it.
4.You suckers really don't get it.
Now, dharma, a sanskrit term laden with an overgrowth of meaning, can be ampu-translated as “one's righteous duty” (thank you, Wikipedia) in this particular context. Essentially, the good doctor was stating that we only get so much time on earth, so we might as well figure out the divinely ordained role that we're suh-posed to be playing out and get cracking with it. A recipe for terminal anxiety, if I ever heard one. As though I want to spend my days struggling towards the conviction that what I'm on the correct path. As though I want to lie on my deathbed, shivering, wondering if I did the (yeah) right things with my life.
The man's intentions were good, I'm sure, just like those of my high school guidance counselor and my aunts, uncles, and parents' friends. People waste a hell of a lot of time, there's no denying that, and chronic indecision does not help matters. Authority figures take it upon themselves to usher the young into some kind of meaningful societal role for the benefit of their emerging souls. To that end, I support their effort, as I certainly feel my best when I strike a healthy balance between productivity and relaxation, rather than laying idle and allowing inertia to draw me into a nagging vortex of anxieties. I do, however, take serious issue with the concept of a divinely ordained role, an optimal occupation, a groove superior to all other grooves into which a wandering soul may fall. In my scant twenty-four years of life, I have seen no evidence whatsoever to suggest that God has any real plan beyond shaking up the snow globe and watching the shiny sparkles fall. And to that, I say “namaste.” In a universe strange enough to offer up brilliantly glowing deep-sea jellyfish, psychedelic fungi, and Dance Dance Revolution – and all this before we even leave the stratosphere of our tiny little planet – it's safe to say that anything goes.
But most people seem to be deeply concerned with the validity of their choices, as evidenced by the pathological ferocity with which they typically defend them. I pause in writing this to wonder whether these individuals fear that, just beyond the light at the end of the tunnel, God's waiting with a freshly printed copy of Santa Claus' legendary naughty~nice list, or whether they're terrified that they'll just sink into the murky abyss of consciouslessness with a lifetime of regrets chained to their leg. Perhaps a little of column A, a little of column B. Either way, they regard a challenge to their principles to be a stab at their throats, as though belief and body were somehow interchangeable. Perhaps interchangeable is not the word; for many, defending a belief is far more important than defending one's own body, as evidenced by truly bizarre behaviors such as suicide bombing and hunger strikes. Revolutionaries, philosophers, and poets (and those who consider themselves to be a mixture of all three) speak vigorously of the glory in giving one's life for an ideal – as though the soul lives forever on the crest of a martyr's conviction – and countless fretful mortals jump at the chance to sacrifice their meat for ideological immortality, to rise as phoenix abstractions from the husks of their flesh.
Many black sheep blame the shepherds for this derangement, accusing them of spreading self-destructive ideologies to the flock in an effort to use the herd for their own gain. From my perspective, however, I see a closely linked yin ~ yang of pulpit and pew. The shepherds clearly satisfy the flock's desires for ideological transcendence... superficially, at least. Otherwise the flock, obviously the majority, would trample their ambitious leaders into the sediment. They want spiritual assurance to pull them from anxiety's crushing grasp. Furthermore, these people crave stability, order, and hierarchy; they fear chaos like a housecat fears water. They require dharma's divinely regimented framework in order to function normally. That word 'dharma' again, spat into Wikipedia's mighty ear, computed, and returned to me as “something established or firm” / “a basic unit of experience” / “path of righteousness” / “the nature of an object” / and “supporter of deities”. A supporter of deities, a temple's foundation, a framework upon which noble abstractions are draped; without dharma, glorious ideology slumps to the soil like a beast without bones. If not for the fragile skeleton of righteous conviction, all that is majestic in the human soul collapses into a turgid slug, and we are not worthy, we are not worthy.
From within the structure of dharma, such a word loaded with spiritual frosting and tradition's savory sprinkles is perfectly appropriate. But from without, another term may be more appropriate. If I may borrow a phrase from the meth-addled alcoholic, blue-collar poet, rock musician, and perpetual outsider Isaac Brock (and yes, I certainly take pleasure in pitting the sentiments of such a character against the mighty forces of tradition and society), the outside perspective describes a "custom concern for the people". Not a divine order, not a command from on high, but a man-made mechanism designed to salve our anxieties.
Let me be perfectly clear: I find no fault whatsoever with the notion that human creates order. The human brain's irrepressible knack for drawing patterns out of chaos not only greatly enhances our survival capacities, but rewards us with traffic signals, card games, glorious music, and so much more. The thesaurus, however, feels differently about things man-made. At any rate, I have found fit to adorn myself with several man-ufactured labels – writer, satirist, philosopher, aesthete, musician, artist, trickster, rogue, magician, viviphile – donning the most appropriate persona for any given situation. It serves me well; even a freewheeling cosmic traveler such as myself needs to touch the ground every now and then. Categorizing an element of our environment according to its utility – dharma tagging, if you don't mind – serves many other humans favorably as well, as evidenced by our unbridled propagation across the curvature of our sphere.
We come now to the dangerously swaying bridge over the chasm between concepts, the seam amidst yin and yang, the de-militarized zone in which language quivers and nice tidy phrasings struggle to keep from offending. I've decried a noble thing, spun around on my heel, and now declare myself in favor of it. Either I've lost my mind huffing computer ions and plant alkaloids day in and day out, or I've found a line in the sand to straddle. Said line appears to be an impassable taboo to most, the closely guarded border between heaven and hell, but I've deemed it my favorite path to tread, the only comfortable road between Scylla and Charybdis. You see, dear friend (and thank you for putting up with my pretentious verbosity thus far), my observation is that expecting one's useful dharma tags to remain constant in an ever fluctuating universe compounds anxiety rather than resolving it. One can only think statically in an environment without variables, condemning one to continuously remove variables from one's environment. My dharma tags, however, are sketched in pencil rather than writ in stone; it's (relatively) easy for me to erase one label and draw up another at a moment's notice. And that goes for the labels I apply to myself as well as the labels I apply to my field of experience.
Allow me to clarify another sentiment: I support the notion of a deity that flows from forest to fingertip, filling the cracks between our cells and thoughts. I believe in God (perhaps not the same as yours, but a God nonetheless), and I believe that God speaks to us and guides us in any myriad of ways. I simply assert that God prefers no action or path over any other. God plays the chess board from both sides of the table, and to make things more interesting, inspires the pieces with free will. Too great a degree of predictability, and the game is no longer amusing, as anyone trapped in a deadlocked chess match can quickly attest. Too much chaos, and any living thing becomes totally overwhelmed and consumed by its environment. Too much order, and no being has any reason left to live (see how many consecutive viewings of the same movie you can sit through, if you don't believe me). God sustains life with balance, and we can sustain ourselves with balance. Yes, we can't help but dharma tag elements of our environment. In fact, it's a damn good idea. But we have to regularly update our labels, just like we regularly update the software on our computers, or risk denying ourselves the very advantage we hoped to gain by dharma tagging in the first place.
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