Why bother?

When it’s easy to escape into a great Netflix miniseries, when it’s legal to lift a mood with legal libations, when a script will produce a bottle of pills to regulate physical or mental symptoms, when everyone else is slinging verbal toxic sludge… why bother putting in the effort to be better of your own volition, just because you can? Why bother being curious when you can easily find justification for your opinions? Why bother being calm when

everyone seems stressed? Why bother being fit when there are a hundreds of adaptations to do the work of your body for you? Why bother?

Because you have to taste yourself. You taste your own emotions first. You taste the hormones & chemicals those emotions evoke. It’s you who lives in that body. It’s you who will reap the rewards and consequences of yourself. You are happening to yourself more than anything else is happening to you. Consider, your body isn’t happening to you, you’re happening to it. I’ll stretch as far to say that you’re happening the world more than it to you, or at least in tandem! Skirting the labor of love of the ‘bother’ is just skirting your own self. And those emotions you have? They’re producing chemicals. Is it worth it?

Emotions are important, and a signal of what’s important. We can’t escape them so they should get airtime in our self-reflection. But does that mean they get to drive the ‘You bus’? A coaching client felt compassion towards someone who did a heinous crime and said she thought she shouldn’t. I reminded her that compassion is an offshoot of love; love is where all the magic happens, the healing, love is the truth, love produces chemicals that bolster our physical and mental health. Hatred, reductionism, and vitriol. these are fear based and cause an existential separation in our sense of self and connection to others, and the release of stress hormones and the detrimental effect that those hormones could illicit. I suggested to her turning off a natural sense of compassion could create a separation from her own state of love in and of her self. Is it worth it? Can’t we hold open the window that lets compassion waft out but shut the door that invites aggressors in? She got it. She really, really got it.

The question dangling between that open window and shut door is: Can we conjure a feeling that we don’t feel because we think we ought to? Yes. Should we? Maybe (No great question has a simple answer). Humans have the unique gift of complex consciousness, malleable grey matter – most of what we adults feel is filtered through what we’ve been taught (programmed) to believe is important and correct. Emotion signaling is all around us in mass media, social dynamics, family cultures etc. So if it's around us, why not be the one to signal yourself? Why not choose to signal yourself more frequently towards love, compassion & curiosity. You’ll first taste the sweet fruits of your own labors and then so will who you pass time with. Because we taste our own emotions first, but those around us (and maybe those not even around us!) also taste the flavor of our emotions – maybe they don’t eat the whole meal but they certainly are down wind of the scents. You should be worth it for your self, but if you need more incentive, you can be worth it for them. It’s actually a form of self care, of relationship responsibility, of social activism. So, that’s why.

You have the why, what about the how. How to shift? Dip yourself into delight – music, nature, a well-practiced yoga session, meditation… be porous to beauty, to the sweeter parts of life, laughter, kindness. Look people in the eyes. Smile. Wonder. Wonder if there’s more to a story. Wonder if the people who annoy you have a reason for their behavior. Wonder how things work. Marvel. Feel gratitude. And certainly, don’t disallow yourself from the natural impulses you have towards compassion, admiration, and thankfulness!

Later, reading Autobiography of a Yogi, By Swami Yogananda, the reminder of how yoga makes it possible to do that popped out. In chapter 24, his story talks about why to do yoga. Simply, as Patanjali wrote in the Yoga Sutras, the quell the fluctuations of our mind, and to know our own divinity. However, at the end of chapter 24, Swami Yogananda writes this: “The western day is nearing when the inner science of self control will be found as necessary as the outer conquest of Nature. The Atomic age will see men’s minds sobered and broadened by the now scientifically indisputable truth that matter is in reality a concentrate of energy. The human mind can and must liberate within itself energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction. An indirect benefit of mankind’s concern over atomic bombs may be an increased practical interest in the science of yoga, a “bomb proof shelter” truly.” (1946)