"What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Do our choices matter? How much should we be weighed down by them? How much responsibility should we take, how much mental effort should we devote to figuring out how to live?
Sometimes I put a lot of pressure on myself. The funny part is, often I don't even recognize that I'm doing it. I'll be walking down the street, thinking. But not just any kind of thinking. Judging, comparing, fixing, problem-solving, figuring out. And what I'm figuring out is often some kind of "should". This morning it was "should I do [XYZ] with my partner?" And I'll be trying to trace out all the implications, to somehow figure out if I'll be happier or less happy, if the world will be a better or worse place. As if I could know that.
Or often, what I'm trying to figure out is some version of "am I okay?" Like, this morning my blitz chess rating dropped below 900 for basically the first time ever — years ago it was around 1200 — and my mind started going down various pathways about what this might mean about me. Probably it's just that I haven't actually been trying to be good at chess... but maybe it's an early signal of cognitive decline. Do I have early Alzheimer's, or am I just getting old? Or maybe it's all the energy I’ve been pouring into personal work, healing childhood trauma and whatnot — that’s been taking a ton of my mental space. And that's good and important work, right? But what if it's not, what if I'm just going around in circles tearing my hair out trying to "fix" myself? And so on and so forth.
So I was walking down the street, chewing, and noticing I was chewing, and kinda judging myself for chewing, and trying not to judge myself, and kinda judging myself for judging myself... and hey, there's that mental "chinese finger trap" again.
Earlier this year I had a moment of insight around this, where I really saw how much stress I put on myself and how the way out (like with the finger cuffs) is to just... not. And I think this is what meditation is getting at, maybe especially Zen and maybe the nondual practices (I know less about those), but it's also so easy to get into striving and thinking and all sorts of doing with meditation and am I doing it right and — hey, there's this construction of self again, the "what does this mean about me?"
So, okay, just let it go. Just don't worry. Stop spending so much mental energy on what I should do and whether I'm going to be okay. Just relax.
It's so much easier said than done. It is so deceptively simple and so fractally difficult. Because the moment I am trying to do it, I'm not doing it. And because these mental patterns are well-ingrained habits: I've had 47 years of practice in self-optimization.
But also. Is it okay to just relax? What will happen to me if I let go of worrying if I'm making the right choice? Will I let go of responsibility? Will I make bad choices? Will I waste my precious time on this earth?
Gosh, there are a lot of cultural messages about this. You have one life, don't waste it. Regret minimization framework. 4,000 weeks. Everything ever written about finding your "true" purpose. I hate the implied pressure in these messages, but I'm also completely steeped in them and prone to thinking this way.
(My friend asked me if I knew anything about the "year to live" program based on Stephen Levine's book, and I said I'd avoided it because I sort of put it in this same category: your life is important, don't waste it, meditate on the inevitability of death so that you make the best possible use of your life. As someone who can never figure out what I think will be the best use of my "precious" time, this just feels like a lot of pressure. But maybe I could look at this another way: maybe if I only had a year to live I'd be more inclined to Just Not Worry About Shit.)
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So here's an interesting thing. When I had that moment of insight, when I briefly could connect with a feeling of letting go of the judging and fixing and worrying... I also had a moment of responsibility feeling good.
See, I often go through life feeling kind of resentful of having to "adult". Responsibility feels like a weight on my shoulders, or even kind of icky (I think it got tied up with some childhood experiences in which I felt like I had to take responsibility for things that weren't mine). I spend much of my energy taking care of other people, and then compulsively stake out time for myself. And it can be really really hard to separate out what's appropriate responsibility from inappropriate responsibility — and also hard to separate out what's taking care of myself from what's unhealthy self-indulgence.
But I had this moment of letting go, and in that moment I felt freed of the icky-ness, freed of the push-pull around responsibility. I could imagine having energy to volunteer, to engage in civic action, or just to not chafe against adulting. The idea of taking responsibility felt almost energizing instead of draining.
In that moment, lightness didn't feel irresponsible, and responsibility didn't feel weighty. It felt like "lightness vs weight" was a false dichotomy.
But it's hard to stay out of the dichotomy. To wit: is "lightness and weight is a false dichotomy" just another form of lightness? (Certainly, that's what weight would have me believe.)
Maybe the proof is in the pudding: if and when I get to the point that I'm not chafing against adulting — when I'm getting fulfillment out of taking responsibility (or perhaps, allowing myself to recognize the fulfillment that I am in fact already getting?) — then I can say that I'm not in the dichotomy, and stop worrying about what that means.
But apparently I'm not there yet, so how do I get there? Do I need to try really hard? Or just stop trying to figure it out?