Zen-ish Thoughts About Neglect

When you woke up this morning, did you decide to ruin your own life, end a long-standing relationship, stop exercising, begin a long run of overeating, substance abuse, and smoking, blow up your job, or decide it was time to see your usual pleasures as no longer worth the effort?

Of course, it would be extraordinary if you did. Things do sometimes change abruptly, but far more often our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors change in small increments, increments that eventually accumulate in a big change that seems to have snuck up on us. Relationships, good self-care, and pleasures rarely end abruptly. They usually end as a result of a thousand small acts of neglect.

When is the last time you invited emotional or physical intimacy with a partner? When is the last time you called up that friend just to talk? When did you notice you had begun to eat too many snacks, and yet kept doing it? How many times did you not exercise on schedule before you admitted you had stopped exercising? How many times did you drink, smoke, ingest, or do something addictive before you acknowledged that you were addicted? You used to enjoy walks in the park, or painting, or bike rides, or … and haven't done that in ages. Did you plan to stop, or did it "just happen"?

This dynamic of imperceptibly slow deaths in various aspect of our lives is surely a permanent feature of the human condition. It only makes sense that many things that claim our attention fade out over time. But these days we live such cognitively and emotionally overloaded lives that mental exhaustion is leading to many more of these slow deaths than we would come by if we lived at a more natural pace. As these small deaths accumulate across different areas of our lives, we may find ourselves feeling more generally dead, fed up, impatient, angry, wondering at the level of effort life requires and the merit of the return we get on that investment.

The corrective is easy to state, hard to do, but not so hard as we like to imagine: vigilance. We often notice small changes, and actively choose to minimize them, what they imply about trouble that is already present, what they imply about things that lie ahead. We need to increase our vigilance, and this too can be in small increments that grow to have a large cumulative effect.

Each "small" time you get angry about someone's bad driving, you are practicing how to get angry over someone's driving. Are you not yet good enough at that? Do you need more practice?

Each "small" time someone important in your life makes a bid for you attention and you give less than your full attention, did you actively choose to do that? Actively or passively chosen, is that a good choice?

Each "small" time you avoid that argument, that subject, that bad habit, that insufficiently exercised good habit, are you planning to act surprised later, when the poop hits the fan?

Persistent gaps between our best interests and our actual feelings, thoughts, and behaviors deserve more of our time. Discuss these things with yourself, with friends, with people who seem to have some wisdom, with a therapist. After a bit of discussion, not waiting for a perfect understanding or a perfect action plan, do something. Treat it as an experiment, learn from it, and then do more instead of neglecting more.

Life is demanding, and we all are tired. We can't stay on top of everything each time it comes up. But we can all be much more intentional than we have been. We are all both a garden and a gardener. Are you responsibly feeding and watering that which you want more of, and removing that you want less of?

To be more explicitly Zen about this, the proposal is to engage in the current moment, now, instead of delaying your response to things that need your attention, seeing them for what they are, with a minimum of illusion and distortion, and stepping more fully into the role of having the level of agency in your life that only you can have.

Are you making sure there is more joy in your life by being more joyful in your life? Are you being more effective by more frequently handling things in the early stages instead of the late stages? It's hard, but it not as hard as the losses we all suffer, incrementally and abruptly, when we stop being good gardeners.