I took my dog, Jack, on a stroll to get coffee today. Coffee for me, not for Jack. It was a beautiful, bluebird morning, temperatures hovering around a mild 75 degrees and the humidity felt like it was nourishing your skin and not draining your soul as the heat of the past several weeks has felt. As we peacefully strolled down the streets lined with impeccable lawns and extravagant verdure, a rather frantic lady rolled down her window, looked at me, and asked for directions to get to Jadwin Gym.
Well, “asked” is a polite way to put it. She did not say “excuse me, sir, may I ask you a question?” Nor did she say it with the inflection in her voice that in the old days one would use when asking questions but nowadays everybody uses to sound like they’re perpetually unsure of themselves. Instead, she demanded knowledge from me: “Tell me how to get to Jadwin Gym,” in a fast, frantic, Jersey accent. I felt like the only thing that would’ve made her statement a better fit with her tone of voice would be to end it with “you mothafuggin’ hippie I will cut your balls off.”
Now, I’ve never been to Jadwin gym before. However, I have heard of it, and I am a Princeton student so I figured the least I can do is spend a second scrolling through my mental archives in hopes of finding “Jadwin Gym”. I asked her for a moment as I thought about it and displayed the interpersonal pinwheel of “ummmm…” “Kinkos…” no, farther… “Krispie Kreme…” no, farther still… “Jadwin gym” AHA! Here we are. All I could remember was the quadrant of campus where it could be found, a feat of amnesia I attribute to the pressure of her unforgiving gaze, which seemed to say that if I didn’t know where this place was, and if I didn’t hurry up and tell her, she would come to my house at night and cut off my balls while Jack watches.
I told her “okay, take a right onto this side street right here,” I pointed to the side street 15 yards away.
“Murray?!” she asked, frantically.
“Yup, Murray!” I replied cordially. Well, 'cordially' is a polite way to put it, since it's very likely that my face started to betray my feelings of amazement at her frantic presence and I started to look at her like she was the sideshow freak who could inhale a full cigarette in one breath and blow it out of her ears. “And then you’re going to follow Murray past Prospect to Western, which is right after Prospect. Take a right on Western, so you’ll be heading back this way,” I pointed the direction one goes after taking two right turns. “Then after just a few hundred yards, you’ll see the stadium on your left – you can’t miss it!” I smiled.
“Okay.” she said driving off, with a tone of disappointment and anger that perhaps arose from the fact that this whole interaction took an entire minute or that I couldn’t just take her straight to Jadwin. Or perhaps she was furious that my directions were not as good as a GPS that she would’ve had if her iphone had been charged which she wasn’t able to do because her husband-she’s-contemplated-divorcing-because-he-never-helps-with-anything took up all the outlets with his stupid TV and his own cell phone charger and her kids wanted her to do a million other things over the past week and then this one lady cut her off on the turnpike and… what does the lady on the turnpike have to do with her iphone? Nothing, really, but the lady on the turnpike has everything to do with why the cut-off-your-balls lady wants to cut off your balls, and why something as little as an uncharged iphone can be amplified to a monstrous presence that ruins your day and emits the BO of bitterness that sprints into the nostrils of everybody within a 20 yard radius of you, leaving them with a twisted sneer and hateful eyes.
This is nothing unusual for New Jersey, which I would bet is the angriest state in the nation (in fact, it made top-3 for "least happy"), but it’s all the more tragic when we consider that this contagiously stressed lady is packed into a state with 1188 other susecptible people per square mile, and so her chances of spreading this contagion are quite high. What’s even worse is that humans never build an immunity against stress or jerks, so the instant somebody is ‘healed’ and no longer infectious, they are right back in the pool of susceptibles just waiting to be infected by the dude who lost at poker or the lady who got a bad haircut or the guy whose baseball team suffered an ignominious loss and then drives like an asshole and cuts people off on the turnpike. It seems our adaptive immunity, often extolled as one of the most complex and beautiful systems created by evolution, which evolves within us over the course of our lives to recognize the most bizarre pathogens that we may have never encountered before, has not yet found a way to deal with people from Jersey.
Such is life in an overpopulated developed world. People have everything they could ask for, things that the founders of New Jersey couldn’t even dream of – we have medicine that has boosted our life expectancy to over 4 times that of my dog (who has already packed in more adventures into his life than most people from Jersey ever will); we have shelters that keep us cool in the harsh summers, warm in the freezing winters, and protected from the deadly trees that crash down during the torrential summer thunderstorms; we have more varieties of food that takes almost no preparation whatsoever (how many people in Jersey have harvested their own fruit, or killed their own cow?) – so much food so easily accessible that people literally die from having too much; We have ‘things’ – TV’s, iphones, computers, air conditioners, refrigerators, cars, airplanes, bowling alley, boob-jobs, hot tubs, jewelry, boutiques… the list goes on. People in Jersey have everything that humans thought they wanted, and yet one drive through New Jersey or one stroll to the coffee shop is all we need to see that Jersey seems to be missing something that matters more. A lot more.
A sense of humor? Courtesy? Humility? Human connection? Love? Compassion? Now where can people from Jersey buy those? Can I get a discount on Love if I get a second boob job? Which of the uncountably infinite strip malls in New Jersey sells Compassion at a good price? Is it the one in Lawrenceville? They have everything in Lawrenceville.
No, it’s not the one in Lawrenceville. It's not even in New Brunswick. In fact, it’s not in any strip mall anywhere because you can’t buy Love or Compassion, *you have to build it yourself*. Our reliance on others to make things for us and do things for us – building our houses, manufacturing our cars and iphones, preparing our food, pumping our water, solving our family problems (shrinks) – has made us so reliant on others for material salvation that we expect to rely on others for spiritual salvation as well. There’s a lot to be said about self-reliance in the 21st century, and revisiting Emerson is something I always recommend, but the most crucial form of self-reliance I want to focus on today, which we should never abandon no matter how developed and interdependent and globalized and Jersey-like the world becomes, is spiritual self-reliance.
By spiritual self-reliance I mean having the *endogenous* ability and the drive to cultivate compassion and connection with the world. To sit down - and want to sit down - and try to see the world through the eyes of the lady who wanted to cut off my balls, and think about how we can make her feel a bit happier next time. I’ve always been a righteous bastard when playing soccer, and one of my most lasting lessons from the sport is that you can’t control your God-given gifts, but you 100% can control your effort. We can’t control our innate ‘goodness’, our innate ability to make the world a more pleasant place for those around us, or our innate ability to turn those frowns upside down, but we 100% can control how hard we try. Thus, there’s a bit more to the story than simple self-reliance - there is also an implicit call for self-discipline, as we need to not only know that we can make ourselves contagiously happy, but we have to have the discipline to do it, and to keep doing it even after a lady looks at you like she wants to cut off your balls.
So how do we become spiritually self-reliant? Well, the exact opposite of spiritual self-reliance would be to live like a spiritual ectotherm. If I were to simply morph my mood to the average mood of strangers around me, I would be the angriest guy the 505 has ever met. However, simply ignoring the angry people will not give me any lasting satisfaction any more than repressing my unpleasant thoughts will give me lasting peace. Nor can I use pity disguised as compassion – “oh, that poor person is so angry… their poor life must really suck. It must be because they're ugly or they're not as good as me... They must have failed at everything… oh, that poor person…” That simply leads to entitlement which we see in too many organized religions “oh, that poor person hasn’t found {insert_savior_ here}… how pitiful they will look as they {insert_form_of_eternal_ damnation_here}...{pat_yourself_on_back_for_being_compassionate}”. I can’t ignore the people, and I can’t pity them, nor can I take of the role of an Atlas or a savior to bear the world's burden and solve their problems… at least not until I have solved my own problems. The option that seems best to me, and what I believe to be spiritual self-reliance, is to work diligently at solving my own problems in hopes of becoming a more radiant presence, and encourage people I know to do the same.
To be clear, by spiritual self-reliance I do not mean to propose that only in solitude can we find salvation. Nor do I believe we should not lean on our friends and family in a time of need and be there for them when they’re feeling down. In fact, I believe this sense of community is crucial and should be fostered whenever and wherever possible. I always think back to my times at the Christian Student Center at UNM. Despite not being a religious man by an Evangelical’s standard, I would find immense joy and sense of place in their presence, and it made me a contagiously happy person and would encourage me to invite others into the fold – to bring more people into the community so they could feel this love and appreciation that radiated from the community, love and appreciation that would later radiate from them as they walked out the doors of the CSC and into the world. By self-reliance, then, I mean that we should always work on our own (in addition to the help we get from others) to foster the DRIVE to be better, because even within these communities of light like the CSC there is a need for engines. The motion of love throughout the world is not perpetual, but depends on all of us to give it a push, and so by spiritual self-reliance I mean that we all cultivate our own desire to push.
I can’t fix New Jersey. In fact, I can’t even fix the life of that one lady who wanted to cut off my balls. Nor can I fix the life of the lady in the coffee shop just minutes later who became horribly upset when I accidentally stepped in quickly to grab my coffee from the counter (as she was moving in to grab her bagel)… it was a crowded room, and I couldn’t see her moving in… it’s a crowded state… it’s becoming a crowded world. We have a span of control that is far less than the number of people whose emotions we inadvertently influence over the course of our day. I can’t even fix the lives of 1/10th the number of people I bump into in my day… However, I can fix myself. By focusing my attention on my own self, my own thoughts, feelings and actions, I can cultivate a glowing compassion in hopes that, of all the interactions in my day that happen so quickly and are so far beyond my control, a respectable fraction of them can lead to the other person walking away feeling happier than they were moments before. Not happy that they got to cut off my balls, but happy that they got directions from a smiling man who would’ve helped them fix a flat despite almost certainly never seeing them again. Not happy that they splashed coffee all over my face, but happy that the gentleman said "pardon me" with a smile, and stepped back to let them get their bagel.
I wasn’t so lucky with the lady asking for directions, or the lady in the coffee shop for that matter, but no worries, I’ll bump into 100 more people today. Probably around 70 of them would answer “yes” if you asked them if they’re stressed out. If I’m lucky, by the end of my day I’ll be able to make some of them happy, and look back fondly on those smiles and thank-you’s I got from 2/5 people who I held the door for, the sincere laughs I brought out of a guy standing in line with me, and the giggles of delight I heard from the little girl who asked if she could pet Jack, only to have Jack walk up and kiss her on the cheek.
That is what happiness looks like in the overpopulated, developed world… it doesn’t come as an explosive force, an orgasm of joy that leaves people bed-ridden with goofy smiles on their faces… it comes slowly, in little trickles, seeping imperceptibly out of the crowds. You can’t notice from the droplets themselves, but you can see from stepping back and looking at the spring as a whole that it’s been seeping less and less as people have gotten more and more, making some people worry that the spring is running dry… But we know better. The spring happiness is not some reservoir that will eventually run dry, but instead will flow forever and we are the ones who control how much it flows, and its flow around us is determined not by how much stuff we have, but how much Love we have. We are the grains of sand out of which this spring flows, but no single grain of sand can single-handedly make the spring flow. The best we can do is focus on ourselves to ensure that our personality permits happiness to flow around us, hopefully helping those close to us do the same, causing those close to them to do the same, and so on… and always, no matter what, avoid becoming the impenetrable cement of someone who has lost the drive to love everyone and forgotten that compassion is not an act but a way of life.
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