2023-09-16 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: 🌞 Summer 🔆 Weekday: Saturday 🗓 Date: September 16, 2023 📅 Week: Sep 11 – Sep 17, 2023

Okay technically I’m writing this on the 17th because it’s 12:16am, but that’s just how my life is at this point in time — I’m staying up super late and just doing everything really late all the time. I love the late-night aesthetic and feeling. I get to sit around and listen to Skin by Dijon and read and generally mull things over. It doesn’t have quite the same freshness that morningtime has, but it instead gets that lived-in, solitary, In the Mood for Love sense of smokiness and love and distressed romance. Or maybe that’s just me.

I don’t really know exactly what to write about. I have something that I want to write about, that would be a really lovely essay, but I don’t quite know how to do it yet. It’s about that sort of late-night flavor of sadness, sadness that feels lovely and beautiful and not-bad, that in fact feels kind of nice in a weird way. But it’s also not really sadness? Really what I originally had planned to write about was about moving past sadness, or rather as taking sadness (or to talk a bit about the origins of these feelings, Weltschmertz or mono no aware or feelings like those) and befriending it. Is it possible to feel sadness as something poignant all the time?

I suppose if I’m honest with myself, in order to address that feeling appropriately I have to address grief. Mono no aware, for example, is quite specifically about the transient nature of the world, but it’s almost always this sort of wistful feeling, which feels much lighter than grief.

As I’m sitting here, the words I really want to say is that distilling all I know about emotional management is pretty simple, which is to never push anything away. Aversion is the real enemy. The real pain of grief is the feeling of not wanting to feel this way anymore. My biggest hangup when Mom died was that I wanted to watch my grief float on by, the analogy so often used by meditation teachers. Doing that only gave rise to another feeling, which was that I felt disgusted at myself for actively trying to not feel grief at something so fundamentally life-changing. On one level, I understand the intellectual basis for that, and I’m sure there’s some actual meta-level way in which this makes sense, but in the more immediate way, I also realized that all of this experience was mired in aversion.

This is, in some way, what Existential Kink is really all about. It’s radical acceptance of really negative emotions giving them positive associations. Of course, I still think that gets tricky with grief. Actually, perhaps it’s not — one of the things about EK is that it’s not always saying that the bad habits and all the ugly stuff you do is good, it’s really about admitting that you feel good doing it, and as such, I don’t think it’s wrong to say things like “I’m afraid that being mad at Mom for leaving us makes me a horrible monster who isn’t empathetic to what happened” and “I’m mad at myself for not having called her every single day that week.” I don’t really think those are EK, but EK may be something like “I will continue to blame myself for her death because it gives me some feeling that I was in control of the situation” or something along those lines.

None of this is stuff that I would write about in the article, but I think understanding my own relationship with this stuff is really crucial. It’s crucial in large part because I simultaneously know that I do identify with so many of these “world-weary” attitudes and that I also kinda beat myself up about them for the same reason. In fact, I think working past those attitudes is probably my own biggest challenge. I often think that they make me seem more smart of clever because they allow for some amount of distance from the world, but distancing yourself from the world is suicide by another name. What’s the difference between a life separated from the world and a life cut short?

All in all, perhaps this is one of my more important — and in fact, one of my most gradual insights — is that the whole “recognition without judgement” aspect of practice is one that I think most people miss out on because they mistake recognition for “watching” instead of “mindfully participating.” I think “participating” in some way sounds wrong or counter to much of the advice that I’ve heard, and perhaps this isn’t entirely “canonically Buddhist practice,” but in general the oft-used analogy of watching thoughts go by during meditation and not engaging with them is somewhat insufficient for “burning off karma” as many people put it. Instead, you need to let all your emotions line up; they have a gift to give you, and you need to let each one have their say and give you what gift they may, regardless of whether or not you want it.