Existential Honesty (but dumb it down please)

Late Night Shower Thoughts

The thing I really want to talk about is body, mind, and soul. That is to say, our internal world, our external world, and whatever the fuck a soul is. Is it okay to curse? I hope it is. I think this piece is for any adult who's been going through a rough time for a long time. It's a bit abstract and does include a few mentions of sexual assault, violence, and substance abuse.

Some people believe that the soul is a thing inside of our body and minds, or that it is completely separate from both. Maybe it isn’t even there. I think that's where a lot of the trouble lies. When we try to care for either the mind or the body separately we end up robbing ourselves. Think about it for a moment. Taking care of your mind… what does that mean? Well my mind likes to be allowed to think about what it wants to think about. It seems best defined as a tool for digesting information and recalling information though. So... caring for a mind could look like recall games or writing out memories, working on a math problem or reading about a topic that interests me.

Caring for my body looks like feeding, exercising, and resting. Think about the most boring versions of these things though. Feeding yourself the exact same thing every day, sleeping the exact same time every night, and going to the gym to lift the same weights day after day.

It’s very clear that our bodies and minds aren’t entirely separate from each other when you try to treat either like a machine. If our bodies really were machines then why do we struggle so much going to the gym or losing that extra 10 pounds even though we know that it’d be good for us? It’s because I cannot care for one part of myself easily while neglecting the others. People who go to the gym every day aren’t just tuning up their car. It is not an equation of “Spend 1000 calories and 1.5 hours of your day.” We are not transactional like that. We don’t simply click a button and execute a perfect plan and skip to the end, we have to go through the whole goddamn thing. We can make plans to do things but never do them. In fact, it is one of my favorite pastimes. Arguably, the “doing” is the hardest part of any plan because once you’ve done something you can’t go back and make a different choice nor get the time and energy back. In fact, there is no such thing as a waste of time or a wrong decision. Not making a decision is just as much of a choice and doing nothing uses just as much time as anything else. From birth until death we are experiencing time, not spending it. Arguably, the only real break we get from time is when we’re totally absorbed in something, like sleep, or death, or flow state. Comparing time to currency is mostly meaningless. There is only ever our next step to puzzle over… if we don’t step forward then life carries us forward anyway, dragging us along for a bumpy ride. I’m sure some of you may think I’m being too obvious with all of this, but being literal is pretty useful.

Ah my body, my body, lest we forget my body all over again. I can feel a tightness in it as I feel the past situations and accompanying emotions surge through it once again. Perhaps it is resisting my typing this subject out as well. Typing, it should be noted, is a somewhat disembodied activity in comparison with writing on paper. Writing on paper requires patience and the feeling out of each shape of each letter and word. Typing on the other hand… well, each button on my keyboard feels about the same besides the space bar. It is more complex, in a literal sense. However, my experience of it is much less connected to the words themselves. I am not shaping the words, I am commanding them into being.

The questions we ask ourselves shape the paths of our lives. My dad’s favorite question that he asks me frequently is “What are you doing with your life?” My favorite question is more often than not “Who am I?” Both of us get stuck when we try to talk to each other about deep things for we are much better with our own currents. That is exactly what asking a deep question is like… it’s a path towards something… a solution we hope.

I used to think about my life as if it were a problem to be solved like in mathematics. That line of thinking is problematic though, as anyone who has suffered through a college semester of philosophy will tell you. Once you've hit upon a solution, your life has already moved past it's relevance and you are struck with another problem. I have tried studying medicine, psychology, history, cultural studies, and philosophy in the hopes of finding this answer that everyone else seemed to have. Do I have degrees to show for these things? Absolutely not. I've been to four colleges but each one keeps trying to teach me how to think. I've made it perfectly clear that I want to know what to think, not how to do it. I wanted to know exactly who I was and what I was and where I was and why I was and when I was. It was like I needed to figure out everything about the current in the river of life that had brought me to be who, where, when, why, and what I was. Eventually, I was hoping I could find someone or something or somewhere that would provide whatever I thought I was looking for. That’s the issue with going out looking for something though I suppose. In order to go out looking for anything, you must be convinced that something is missing in the first place. I don’t really remember when I first became conscious of my own feeling of emptiness, but I do know that the looking itself is full of suffering. It hurts to admit all the things you don’t know. It hurts to accept this part of yourself that is as clueless as ever. If you empathized with that statement, then I would remind you that the most clueless creatures on earth don’t seem to be suffering the way you are. It is not even because they are ignorant either. It’s simply easier for them to accept all of themselves because why shouldn’t they accept all that they are. The truth isn’t out there somewhere, it’s something we have forgotten along the way. The only thing that truly separates an adult from a newborn baby is a bit of experience, so handle yourself with the same care that you would a child. And before you get all defensive or put out by that statement, realize that you deserve to be cared for, just as much as any child, no more and no less.

In life it is completely meaningless to judge ourselves by other’s beauty or accomplishments. Happiness is simple in comparison to the complex array of sorrows we may experience. Perhaps it is easier to say what happiness isn’t than to describe exactly what it is. Happiness is not delusional, but it is imaginative. Happiness is not profitable, but it is valuable. Happiness is not loneliness, but it can be solitude. Happiness is not being lost, but it is being free. Happiness isn’t something that belongs to anyone, but you can hold it while it’s here. Happiness isn’t something you can give someone, but it is something you can share.

I’ve been doing a lot of meditation lately and trying to connect really abstract concepts together through my own experience of them. I understand that I’ve been incredibly privileged to have been given this opportunity without intentionally seeking the experience out as so many wise wanderers have done before me. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the concept of embodiment through the lens of trauma and recovery. I have been sober from all substances for 8 months, however, I used to abuse alcohol and I did a lot of mushrooms. Note: abusing mushrooms implies I was worse off for the way that I used them which is not something that I truly believe. However, after doing a significant amount of psychedelics and now having had my experiences with contemplative practices and meditation, I no longer am of the belief that psychedelics bring about any human experience that wouldn’t already be possible through other methods. I’m speaking about breath-work meditation in particular. Sobriety has given me more clarity about what was actually happening while I was high. Had I not gotten sober, I may have remained in a dissolved ego state for much longer, and therefore content, but I firmly believe that being connected to constituted reality and to other normal human beings is important to life. It is in fact disembodied to write about what I am about to write about, but I have COVID 19 right now and that is why I am releasing this restless energy into the internet. I also hope it helps someone, even if it's just a tiny bit.

My thinking about the human experience has rapidly expanded in the last year, for which I am incredibly grateful. There was so much more joy, love, and peace in the world than I had ever expected to find. There is much more to experience too, I am sure, as I have not yet had many of the experiences I do look forward to. Things like caring for a child, a parent, a retry on caring for animals. I did not understand or care how important my actions were in the past and I know I am still learning. I thought it was all meaningless and I was lost in despair for many years. I felt so goddamn small and inconsequential that it made me want to scream into the void, which I did frequently. Drinking myself to death felt a lot like screaming at a void waiting for something, anything, to give me answers for my miserable existence. I hated myself, I hated what I hoped for, I hated my desires, and I hated the people who loved me. It was all a secret of course. It felt like the only sane way to get through life was to slowly poison myself and let that leak into other people, places, and things around me. It felt like it was the only way to discharge whatever it was that was going on just below my skin. By making other people understand who I was, and why I was the way that I was, I thought I had found my solution. I found solace in thinking that I could make other people understand if only they would listen and truly understand. I was wrong of course, but I didn’t realize until much later.

What I was experiencing, I have found out only in the last year, was chronic disembodiment and soullessness. It wasn’t that I straight up didn’t have a soul, only that it seemed like I had lost it and didn't know how to find it again. In other words, I was hurting. The different parts of myself were wandering further and further away from each other. When people talked about the concept of being whole, it made me want to scoff or cry, and I could never decide which was better.

Nihilism is the concept that the universe is devoid of meaning, and perhaps the resignation to meaninglessness is the best we can do.

Existentialism is a step further, but is kinda egotistical because it is so mind over matter. Existentialism is the idea that we project our own meaning onto the world around us, and therefore the universe does have meaning, but only as long as we tell a story about it and ourselves. If no consciousness existed to tell a story, the meaning of the universe would once again be stripped of all meaning. Existentialism feels like building a flimsy tent in a windstorm that gets knocked over time and time again. We tell ourselves a story about our existence only to scrap it later. The solace, I suppose is in building a better story that lasts a little longer each time. Every time the story you tell yourself is destroyed by the usual things (grief, trauma, chronic illness, boredom, etc...) you will discover that life continues anyway and that is supposed to be comforting somehow. I suppose it sort of is? At this point existentialism feels like a story too. Where should my attention be going if not to philosophically trying to suss out the meaning of my humorously small existence?

Have you ever thought about the fact that life only ever makes sense when we look backwards? I mean, sometimes we have pretty good answers for our suffering in the present, but they tend to be stories we tell ourselves, not true explanations.

Oh no not the inevitable consequences to my own decisions! We tell ourselves that consequences for bad choices are inevitable because it makes us feel better and helps us to trouble shoot. Making mistakes seems like the only real inevitability to me. Sometimes the obvious answers are easy, but other times answers feel impossible. How do you cure something from the confines of your mind when the ailment is within the body too? Our mistakes do not only affect one part of us, they affect all of us. We love to break pieces of ourselves and our lives into categories though, if only they would stay there. Mind. Heart. Soul. Body. Leg. Foot.

If only my sexual assault only affected my body... but no, everything affects everything. Your body wasn't in a car accident, all of you was in a car accident. Your body was in a car accident but it took the rest of you for the ride. The categories simply don't hold up. Loneliness decreases life expectancy. Trauma linked to IBS. Stress linked to blood pressure. Addiction linked to mental health issues. What happens in one part of you happens in all the others too.

So then, I hope you have wondered by now, what is a soul? How can we categorically break all of our parts down and end up with something extra? Someone must've made a mistake when they invented the word right? Personally? I don't think so. I think the soul is just what we call the abstract part of ourselves that we cannot otherwise explain. Soul in Hebrew directly translates to breath. Breath is something we do automatically or manually. Breath is here and now. Take a deep breath. In for 5 4 3 2 1, hold 4 3 2 1, let go 4 3 2 1. That is your soul. It is always there for you, and it always helps, no matter how meaningless you believe it to be.

I'm not sure if anyone else has ever noticed this (rhetorical), but doing things hurts. Try standing, eventually it hurts. Try thinking, eventually (even if it takes a lonnnnng time) it hurts. Try laying down for that matter, eventually it hurts too. I have COVID right now and my ass, well it hurts! Doing anything hurts. Not doing anything hurts. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in an activity that it doesn't hurt though. We get lost in things. We are designed to get lost in things. We get lost... and eventually we come back. That is the relief in life. We come back to our bodies, our minds, our laughter, our dancing, our sadness, our joy, our friends. All of these things change in life, people die, joy is found in different things. Soul then, is an experiencing of this leaving and coming back motion that I am clumsily trying to explain. Coming back to the breath means we had to leave the breath, but that isn't the point. It's the the experience of the entire journey that is the point. You must accept tears or you will invite bitterness, laughter or you will invite indifference. Acceptance really only means permission. Sometimes acceptance will elude you despite your intentions. In times like these we need only to accept the part of ourselves that is holding on. Give permission to the part of you that refuses to let go, and even if it keeps holding on, accept it anyways. The way to change is to accept the part of ourselves that believes we cannot. We do not pry open our fist with our other hand when we need to let go of something. Say to your hand, "I notice that you are holding on tightly. It's okay that you're holding on to that because I am holding onto you and I can wait."

Namaste bitches. - Calla Hoskins