Living Intentionally

September 12, 2006

I came across this phrase today– living intentionally– that had never really registered with me in the past (perhaps because I am allergic to self-help books) but is a perfect summation of what all my recent lifestyle changes are about. Talking too much about such changes invokes a kind of superstition… too often the choice seems to be between those who talk about doing and those who actually do… and I prefer the second.

In a long letter I wrote to a friend recently I described my desire to “be present” in my life. That’s my own way of trying to live with more intention. Everything I am working on in my life– lowering stress, exercise, changing eating habits, memorizing poems, writing regularly– is a part of that effort to be more present.

I’m no good at it. Within minutes of reminding myself of these goals I’ll find myself in a trivial argument with someone online or mindlessly surfing when I should be working. The whole contemporary mode of living with all its technological affordances and entertainments seems to be an invitation to dilute my attention, to procrastinate, to avoid the hard questions… until I am hardly even present in my own life. But the only answer is to keep trying. I assume that staying keenly conscious, like meditation, is a skill that becomes stronger with effort and repetition.

Oddly, a lot of being present and living in an intentional manner has to do with letting go. I had a personal example to help me figure this out: I let go of the television quite a while ago and– until recently– that was the best decision I ever made. Now I work on letting go of my materialism, taming my physical appetites, re-engaging with my body as a properly cared for machine necessary for my soul’s survival.

I don’t know what kind of time I have left, but I want to be there for more of it. I want to multi-task less and engage fully more often. Walking around the campus last night as darkness descended I realized that I have to face up to what I will never be… and what I won’t be again. I’ll never again be an emotional 20-year old angry young writer smoking cigarettes outside the student center. I’ll never be the poet under 25 (or 30, or even 35) that I wanted to be.

I have to figure out how to be comfortable in my own skin with what I know and what I love. So I won’t be writing poems re-arranging Lorca or writing through the dialogue of Fassbinder films. I’ll probably never be accepted as part of the circles of hip poets with their button-ups and messenger bags milling around outside rooms in NYC. It’s highly unlikely I’ll be written up in Silliman’s blog as yet another of the bestest avant poets ever.

Instead I’ll toil in my quietude. I’d like to understand some of these other poetries and I’ll keep trying because the honest striving for empathy and understanding of others and their projects is part of being wholly engaged… hopefully I can learn something from them. But I’m OK with my little poems and poets who speak in languages and perform a magic that I can understand. The post-avant crowd are the string-theorists of my world– very much the big thing, clearly important, and vaguely (and sometimes astonishingly) interesting, but mostly incomprehensible and certainly not something I’m likely to find myself doing.

It’s not a zero-sum game. I don’t need to minimize other art to elevate my own. I’ve spent most of my life conceiving of “rightness” as a binary struggle, us and them, dog eat dog. Someone liking a book or poem I did not– or refusing to acknowledge the quality of those I did– was an affront. A friend not taking my advice may as well have been spitting in my face. Reading a blog that praised a poet whose work appeared to me hardly to be poetry at all was a direct attack. Almost all of it’s been a waste of time. There is a time for productive debate in many arenas, but when it comes to art and being an artist, differences are almost always healthy. Why not just let myself love them and the powerful passion that motivates them?

I appreciate that there are beautiful things in the world I can’t find my way into. They are challenges, not insults. When others miss out on the value of something I see I will just count myself lucky. There doesn’t have to be a point to it, there doesn’t have to be a winner. Looking for the first and trying to be the second is just so much wasted time. Time I don’t have.

Tags: life, poetics, Psyche, Writing