There's a spiritual practice known as "living in the day". It's generally taken to be a part of the AA Programme, but I can't recall it being mentioned in the Big Book. It's one of those phrases I heard in my early days and wondered what they were all talking about, and at sometime over the years, I stopped wondering, because I was doing it. I can't explain what it is, and it's nothing like any of the quotes you may find if you google the phrase, but this may give you an idea.
Living in the day lets me feel emotions. Joy, irritation, frustration, exhilaration, calm, pleasure... all these are emotions that pass in a fairly short time, leaving me able to get on to the next thing I need to do. I wake up the next morning feeling whatever my physical condition is - rested, horny, creaky, tired - but starting emotionally from zero. I don't feel anything else until I load up the diary for the day, when I may then feel various shades of anticipation, dread or irritation. Sounds good so far?
For that to work, yesterday must leave little or no emotional traces. Now think about that for a moment. Imagine not carrying over any emotions from yesterday. No, I don't just mean anger, frustration, irritation and all that other bad stuff we are exhorted to leave outside the bedroom door. I mean, not carrying over any emotions. LIke, you know... Love. Affection. Ambition. Fascination. Absorption.
Because it turns out that practising the techniques that let me leave behind the bad stuff and the small stuff also leaves behind the big stuff as well. I don't even really remember what it is I feel for whoever's in bed with me: I just give them a chance to show what mood they are in, and react and deal accordingly. That's how you will feel about the woman you're married to or the kids you created, if you "live in the day". And if you're wondering, no, that's not how you are supposed to feel. Not at all. Those emotions about those people are supposed to be always with you - whichever emotions it you'e feeling at the time.
Love, hate, ambition, despair, enthusiasm, hope, desire, lust, care, revenge, affection, friendship, competition... The emotions that make life worth living, that give it structure, colour and flavour, do so because they infuse our bodies - literally, with hormones - and create continuity and memory, linking the days together, linking this hour with an hour four days or four weeks ago. When I live in the day I feel none of these, not because I don't want to, but because whatever it is that lets the insults and pleasures of the day roll off my back like a duck, also means that the meaningful emotions won't stick either.
One of the things that happened to me as I recovered was that I understood that all I ever really felt was variations on that sick neediness, pain and emptiness that comes with the territory. These are also meaningful emotions that create memory, but none have anything to do with other people, other specific people, as love and hate do. For screw-ups, emotions are endless loops inside our own heads, hearts, bodies and memories. Dump those emotions, deal with the resentments and guilts in the Steps, and it's quite easy to live in the day.
In the early years, it's a helluva an improvement on being hungover, withdrawn, flooded with pounding adrenals, ridden with undeserved guilt and hearing punishing voices in your head. But in the same way a Japanese stone garden is an improvement on the brambles and weeds that were there. It's clean, it's simple, it's low maintenance, and it's pretty vacant. I'm not sure I have much of choice, just as you don't have much of a choice about never knowing what a co-homology group is (because you gave up maths well before you went to university and you haven't got the time or background to read it up now). Which doesn't stop my body telling me from time to time that it's missing some stuff it needs to function really well, which leads me to feeling a tad empty, directionless and generally de-motivated and lacking sparkle and vigour. That passes, given enough time, but the last few weeks have been just a little empty.
Living in the day, like a lot of the other "spiritual"-sounding practices, is not for ordinary folk. It's for people who are or were severely fucked-up for an extended period of their lives: heroin addicts, alcoholics, children who passed through The System or who were abused or mistreated, not to mention people who have been through extended traumatic experiences that the rest of the world knows nothing of. That is unlikely to be you, gentle reader, and you'll screw your life and soul up if you try it.
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