Trouble in Paradise

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”

Job 1:21

“We try so hard to put order into our lives and into the cosmos. There is none… Chaos is our home. It is always becoming, ending, starting anew.”

Fr. Thomas Keating

There is a distinctly human desire to become, I think. It’s what led me to begin training, over a decade ago. I disliked what I thought myself to be, so I sought to change it; I’m still not done with the work that I started - although the nature of my work has certainly changed, perhaps softened.

My initial motive was rooted in a recognition of disorder and lack; I felt weak and incapable of achieving the things that I wanted. Training offered a solution, a pathway. I saw, dimly lit, an ideation of paradise - a point where who I am, and who I want to be, converge.

The bulk of my adolescent years were spent on a mat - wrestling, fighting, changing; hard efforts and friction. Thousands and thousands of reps; becoming more sure of who I was. 

But, this “identity” that I found was relational, mercurial - contextual, not self-evident. I related myself to the world, constructing a sense of meaning through outward identification.

The 10,000 Things, Legion; none are Absolute.

Who am I, without comparatives, and superlatives, and feverish clinging, and vain ambition? Without validation, laurels, and praise?

The fire that drove me toward “becoming” began to flicker and fade; I saw the whole world passing away, and myself with it.

Myself and the kings of old have much in common - soon, I will be dust. Then, I will be nothing at all.

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Matthew 6:19-21

My motive for training began to change; I no longer sought a final physical end, in becoming something or someone. The “someone” that I sought to become was inherently limiting - I was building a mental, mechanical construct. I must become what I believe I should be; I must act, as customs and culture dictate. Rather, I recognized that the very “becoming” was a denial of Life.

Training became a liminal space, a kind of bardo, a purgatory; the external motivators that previously lit the way withered, slowly. I turned from things that previously spurred me onward.

Training, for the sake of vanity, or pride, or ambition alone is inevitably rooted in death. Everything that “I am,” materially, will be obliterated - lost, in an instant. But, what is fundamentally real can never fade. 

What is fundamentally real? What is Eternity?

Physical training is a tool to expose what is real; to separate the wheat from the tares. Rather than a tool to become, it can be a tool to return; a return to what is true, good, beautiful, and intensely vital. A surrendering of the lesser, to the Greater; a homecoming.

I am still afraid, in certain ways, of letting go of what I “ought to be.” I recognize the influence of conditioning, and selfishness, and crystallized, mechanistic thinking; I wrestle, still. 

“Through error and through sufferings I come, through many failures and through countless woes.”

Richard Wagner, Parsifal

What I “ought to be” is death, yet the path of Life was given to us, through grace; through grace, I might walk homeward.

The man of the world is the death-man; the bureaucrat, the hedonist, the self-satisfied academic. He clings to the temporal, and time binds him; when the clock strikes midnight, the ego burns him up with it.

“All these things at once fell into dust, and I was left alone, and thirsting, in a land of sand and thorns…”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Idylls of the King

Temporal paradise, in itself, is trouble. 

Where there is hope, there is fear. 

Where there is birth, there is death. 

Where there is growth, there is decay.

Where there is pleasure, there is pain.

Where there is order, there is disorder. 

Utopia, “paradise,” is a swelling before the wave’s crash.

Beyond the opposites is the razor’s edge toward Life, where the light of the world burns from within, not without.

Onward, toward the paradise of wisdom-tempered love.