“I’m an animal activist. Many people say that I’m a hypocrite, because I eat burgers and stuff like that but I won’t wear fur. But I’m not a hypocrite. I just only wear fake fur.”
Despite our best efforts, most of us default to binary thinking. We have a tendency to seek total solutions to the problem of living in the world with all its challenges. A survey of the top self-help gurus of the day returns many clean-cut people advertising success. They’ve found the solution to our problems.
Minimalism promises to end the irritation of stuff. Carefully constructed diets with attention to macros eliminate imprecise eating. Exercise regimes ensure constant improvement.
There is much to approve in these lifestyle choices. Drowning in useless miscellany, eating dissatisfying junk, living as a couch potato: all can seriously inhibit health and growth. Afterall, these programs for success wouldn’t sell without a grain of truth.
The part that is missing is an essential feature of most people: paradox and contradiction. An unlikely vessel for profound truths, Paris Hilton, quoted above, is on to something. Despite her concern for animals of the world, she is infamous for her love and salacious advertisement of meaty burgers. People who wag a finger at this display of complexity ought to take a look in the mirror.
Most of us have our excesses. Some we should seek to eliminate. Others we should embrace in addition to efforts to mitigate the ill effects of an excessive lifestyle. Take for example scheduling too many activities. It is astonishing how quickly life can become an unbearable grind. Even mothers of young children and retirees can be so plagued by activities they have agreed to do and programs they have committed to that there is no leisure.
The “solution,” might at first appear to be a carefully calibrated daily schedule of the “correct” number of activities. This is a mistake for most people. To dip a toe into an activity—jazz piano, youth soccer, couples tennis, sewing club, amateur theater, book club, almost any club—is to be swept up in a flurry of ancillary commitments. Rather than futilely trying to stem the daily tide of overcommitment, there’s something to be said for establishing phases. There is a time of overly enthusiastic scheduled activities; there is a period of boredom spent puttering around the house, the kids all bickering.
After time in one phase, it can become oppressive, and the beginning of the next phase feels liberating. By the time the end of that phase is in view, it is a sweet relief to relinquish it.
Similarly, fasting is not a total lifestyle. The practice of fasting goes hand-in-hand with the seeming opposite: feasting. Eating carefully apportioned three-meals-and-two-snacks each day simply does not have the same result. Something about the agility of switching between vastly different modes of eating can be energizing and vivifying.
Something else uttered by the age-less cultural phenomenon that is Paris Hilton: She eats in extremes. It’s either foie gras or burgers and fries: embrace the variation. This quote is harder to track down on the world wide web. Who knew the internet scribes knew not to preserve the profundities of Ms. Hilton, but it was a real quote, featured in syndicated newsprint circa 2006.
Back to the question of seemingly irreconcilable extremes of lifestyle: Maybe it’s the development of adaptability. By learning to stretch in either direction, we find equanimity.
There’s no need to be dogmatic about it. Of course, there should be no month of psychedelic drug use followed by sobriety. Though, if you can pull that off, maybe there’s something to be said for the benefits thereof. But it’s a gamble. A mighty, might gamble.
In pursuit of a full life, accepting the seeming contradictions of our nature is a surer path to joy. Equilibrium, homeostasis, balance. These states of being belie the circuitous path of achieving them. The behavior that can result in an even keel disposition can be a surprisingly wide-ranging when mapped on a graph.
2 comments
Comments are closed.