Sleeping at the Wheel

Doublebinds and Contradictions

Why cant I remember a lot of the calls and my time at the fire department? Cognitive dissonance? I just went some place else a lot. Really, I think I did a lot of that. Helped get through a rough childhood, abusive first marriage, and a difficult job that will never get any easier. I went someplace else.

And looking back on things at the fire department it seems like I spent the good majority of my time there looking for myself. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got in to it. And whenever we weren’t on calls I was in a book or on the computer, always searching.

What was I looking for? What wasn’t I doing? Paying attention. It’s not as though I didn’t give myself to people when the time called for it. Time and place. The time left for us thoigh? I wasn’t as often at the table or in the recliner. I was in my head or looking out beyond the walls of the station. Looking now at my friends, those who have gone and those who remain, and I notice that many of them don’t have any problem paying attention, in fact maybe they do it a little too well.

And then the words we assign to things begin to make more sense. What does your attention COST? How much do you pay and what is the currency exchanged when you are always paying attention? And CAN you actually do that? So what is missed when you are always on?

When I was a kid I would walk around the store and try and move like a cyborg from the Terminator movies. I thought the adults acted like robots when they were in public too. Classic case of mimicry. It’s how we learn. Well I saw myself in the mirror at the store and I have to admit, I looked rather silly.

Only a robot stays on all the time. Yeah it still looks silly. But it also looks exhausting. And when I try or find myself in that state of always “being on,” I also feel exhausted. The muscles in my face feel tired and sore with my forced gaze that characterized the day.

So maybe paying attention doesn’t always yield the best fruit, not all the time. Maybe being present isn’t always being on, rather present with yourself, at the ready with what presets itself TO you.

Paying attention to the environments around you, particularly with people, show us patterns, don’t they? And the more observant you are, the better you get at recognizing patterns and associating them with other patterns. Are any of these patterns the people though, wiggly and unpredictable?

Good pattern recognition makes predictions of the future based on algorithmic data from the past. Good for stock trading, not for interdependent human relationships. The best among us will still be unable to know the outcome of the preset moment, for it is the unpredictability of the present moment that makes it so illusive. If you live in the past to predict the future, the present will slip through your fingers. It’s just that simple.

Why do you NEED to know what’s going to happen next? Why do you NEED to be a creature of habit? Yes we will fall into patterns anyway. But shouldn’t we examine the ones which have been assigned to us and ask on a spiritual level if we ARE those patterns of movement, action, and thought? Am I what other people say about me in its entirety? What their eyes can see from curated experiences with me, devoid of the context in my head that underwrote my end of the experience?

Is it good for us to think of other people that way, or is it convenient? I think it’s convenient. Convenience, like when you buy a product from a store, comes at a cost, and involves a bit of sorcery. You buy a table, using money earned from your labor (which is not equal to the labor of having made the table, or you would have made the table), and in exchange you remain ignorant to the process to build a table, from that original tree which was fallen to the final coat of stain. And in the absence of that lived memory of what it took to build the table you can in turn use that saved time to go on holiday.

And when it comes to people, things really get messy. Do you really WANT to know why that person does what they do? Or doesn’t do what they don’t? Or would it be more convenient to abbreviate the narrative and move on? Who has time to ask the hard questions? The ones that cut in both directions… It’s hard to sell that one, and you can’t win people over very well either, because such inquiry usually leaves no one unscathed.

So what are we paying attention to? People or systems? Patterns of behavior, or the individuals trapped in Samsara? Or our own reflections? WHY do you pattern? Who or what engrained that in you? The functioning of a society relies on the predictability of people operating within systems. And some of that homogeneity is important, like on a 6-lane freeway. Time and place though, right? The Third Reich relied upon that same predictability to carry out their own state agendas, efficiently moved along by people.

We all go on autopilot sometimes when we drive, and we do it a lot in life too I think. We might be paying attention to the movements of the people around us, but fail to recognize that we are moving in that system too. Do we follow a recognizable set of patterns to the people watching us? If it were you in the court of public opinion wouldn’t you want that nuance over convenience? “Oh he’s just…” “you’re so…” “you always” “you never”

But that’s not likely in this fast paced society we live in. There’s less predictability in the inquiry. And if we operate within the bounds of predictable behaviors it will continue to happen, and to you too.

So be spontaneous. And do not attempt to eliminate spontaneity where it arises. It is there where the present moment is found. The individual articulation. The you before you were socialized and told how to be, who you were, what to think, and how to act. Like the Japanese Koan, your original face before your mother and father were born.

It is from that center that life originates and emanates. And it is from the corporate-controlled state that you receive your marching orders. Choose. Which serves you? Which do you serve?