The Smilist

I have decided that my form of protest is smiling. I have always wanted to be more of a social activist but have just never been one to involve myself in large causes. I seem to stray away from any kind of cause that can not immediately have an effect on the thing I am trying to change. Maybe this is why I have always enjoyed protest as a solo act. Throughout my life I have done this in many ways- being a vegan, holding a protest sign on the side of a busy road day after day, spending my days reading novels, making art, spending the afternoon walking around when I should be working, turning American flags upside down and now I am smiling.

For the past few years I have been observing other people’s faces. I look at their faces while they walk down the street, sit at bus stops or drive their cars. One phenomenon that I have noticed is that the great majority of people have what look like grimace on their faces. The opposite of smiles. In the past year I have noticed that the sides of people’s lips have begun to droop even further downwards indicating a feeling of defeat and distress. Brows have become chronically furrowed and more and more people have wave-like distress lines on their foreheads. I began to feel that the smile was becoming in danger of extinction. As a result, one morning many weeks ago, I spent hours practicing my smile in my bathroom mirror. I also had unconsciously developed a chronic grimace and it was tiring to keep the sides of my lips and cheeks in an upright position. I had to retrain myself to smile by holding a smile for as long as I could and repeating the mantra “life is good” over and over. After a few days of practice I was able to keep a smile on my face all day long.

Every time that I leave my house I am actively smiling. I smile at whomever I pass by. I smile when I walk, talk and browse in the supermarket. I am making a conscious effort to look strangers in the eye and smile. Some people seem to appreciate this and reflect a shy smile back at me. Most other people seem to be put off by my smile and tell me this by looking the other way. I suppose unhappiness gets really comfortable after awhile and the sight of a person smiling at you may be too much to handle. I am compassionate about this so I do not take other people’s dismissiveness personally. What I do take personally is the people who seem to enjoy trying to wipe the smile right off my face.

There are always those few people who are so unhappy and miserable inside that they want the rest of the world to feel this way also. As a person who is making the conscious effort to save the smile from extinction I try to continue to smile at a person even when they are calling me “gay,” “idiot,” or any other derogatory term I have heard shouted my way. There have been a few men who have tried to physically attack me when I smiled at them- I assume this was because they are insecure in their own sexuality and assumed I was coming on to them. The other day I was run out of a record store because a large man with tattoos was threatening to cut my balls off because I was smiling at him. I admit, maybe I was partially to blame for this. The tattooed man looked so deeply angry that I had to smile at him a little bit longer than I should have.

I have heard it said that smiling is contagious but what I have found to be true is the opposite. Smiling can also be offensive. Maybe it is because we are living in a time where people are so stressed, over worked and worried about money that smiling represents a kind of mockery of the average Americans situation. People in America are really suffering at the moment and smiling as a result is not in fashion. I have found that to fit in you have to frown, or smile just a little bit. The person who decides to walk down a city street with a big smile on their face is considered to either be mentally ill or unstable in some sort of way. When I walk through the town where I live I am continually hearing names hurled at me from passing car windows. What I have heard most often as of late is “there is that smilist again.”

So be it.

Maybe I am the idiot but it is my belief that we create our reality from the inside out. There are things that happen to us that are beyond our control, but we do have control over how we choose to think about these experiences. If a person decides to shout a negative name at me, or be disrespectful towards me because I am smiling it is my choice whether or not I allow myself to get mad or just let it go and keep smiling. As far as I am concerned- if each individual does not take responsibility for his or her own inner well being, then the smile is doomed to become extinct. For now I will keep working to keep the smile alive. I will walk, drive, sleep with a smile on my face despite the danger that this seems to be putting me in. When others try to bring me down I will continue to smile. If they want to shout “smilist” from their car windows at me, then I will smile more. Please, if you can- join me and start smiling. Life is better this way.

Meditation Is For Loosers.

I used to meditate every day. In fact now that I do not meditate every day- a certain guilt lingers in my gut. I feel like I am missing something. But I find it difficult to assume the lotus posture from day to day. Instead I get caught up in the silent fury of the day and try to spend as little time as I can erasing my thoughts. The other day a millionaire friend of mine said to me “don’t worry, meditation is for loosers.” I thought about what he said with intense consideration. I wondered if I was looser. “If you need to sit in silence and get all the thoughts out of your head….then you should live with cats and dogs,” he said to me when we were discussing meditation. “We are living in tough times, maybe the end of time as we know it…and as far as I am concerned when the plane is falling out of the sky I want to be around people who are going to work hard, brilliantly to bring the plane back into flight rather than people who are just going to sit there with their backs straight, clear their minds and focus on breathing. Meditation is for people who can’t handle the heat or the stress of their own mind…as far as I am concerned they are loosers,” he said before excusing himself from the room to make a gin and tonic.

Maybe meditation is for loosers. The minds of men and women, which become so compounded by unruly thoughts, needs to be controlled. But do we really need to assume some Asain posture and focus on our breath until the mind stops jabbering back and forth. Can’t we just find some activity that we love doing, some book that we love reading, or some worth while form of activism and pre-occupy ourselves with doing these things rather than turning off and going into a state of vegetation. A meditation teacher of mine once said that in a time of crisis meditation was one of the more pro-active things a human could do. I always thought that this was a nice way to rationalize away his inactivity….his looserness.

The world is in a state of degeneration. Every species is in decline. The human animal is destroying itself quickly. The sea is turning black. It makes sense to think “why not slow down and meditate. If everyone in the world did this we could avoid global warming, wars would end and things would return to a state of balance.” Maybe so, but like my millionaire friend said, “when the plane is going down I want to be around people who are doing something.”

Yesterday I saw a sign that said “Meditate For Global Warming Inside.” I went into the room which was filled with all different kinds of people meditating. Hundreds of human beings sitting silently together sharing the same silent air. Incense was burning and there was a Tibetan man in Buddhist garb sitting on a throne in the front of the room directing the meditation. A women waved me over towards an empty cushion upon which I sat and assumed the lotus position. After a few moments of settling my restless mind I focused on my breath and began to relax. As I shut my eyes the woman besides me whispered into my ears, “imagine the possibilities.”

After twenty minutes of sitting silently in meditation I could take it no more. I kept hearing my millionaire friends voice saying “meditation is for loosers.” I kept thinking about all the things I could be doing with this time. I could be finishing the book that has taken me weeks to read. I could be making art work, I could be walking in the woods, I could be paying bills, I could be doing all the things I am constantly putting off- but instead I am sitting here doing nothing. The Tibetan in the front of the room said “be mindful of our restless minds. Don’t allow our thoughts to carry us away. Stay here now and be nobody. Emptiness. A vessel of the divine.” I did not want to be a vessel of the divine. I wanted to be a vessel of myself- so with rage in my gut I stood up and said much louder that I expected to “meditation is for loosers.” The whole room of silent, peace loving meditator’s turned around. Some looked shocked others looked enraged. As I turned around and walked out I had heard someone yell at me “you are the looser!”

Maybe I am a looser. I am almost forty years of age and I am yet to have any idea what I am going to do with my life. I still take money from my parents and my credit is horrible. Depression often sneaks up on me like an entity that wants to steal my soul. I spend a lot of time staring and blank walls mystified by the fact that I am in the prime of my life yet I have little ambition. The desire to make money and succeed is as strong in me as it is in a slug. I’d rather spend my days playing my trumpet than working away my life. It is possible that I am a looser. My millionaire friend is always impressed by my ability to do nothing. When I tell him that my strategy to prevent global warming from destroying humanity is to make as little money as possible and to stay at home as much as I can, he sneers at me in disbelief. He like most people does not understand my form of activism. “You should just spend your days in meditation,” he says to me. I know what he really means. He is saying to me, “you are a lost cause, a looser who can not save the world and this is why you should meditate.” We are at the edge of the roof, maybe it is not such a bad idea to just sit down and be still.

Squeezed.

I am a man who is being squeezed from the inside out or maybe the outside in. I do not know which comes first- the outside pressure or the inside pressure, but if Karl Marx was right when he said that society determines the behavior and health of man/woman kind- then it is the the world that is squeezing me. Between the pressure that the earth is placing upon human beings to change or be eliminated and the pressure that government is placing up the individual to pay up or go broke- the outside is squeezing me like a balloon which might just burst. Between rising gas prices, food shortages, recessions, depressions, wars, deficits, unequal distribution of wealth, rising costs and poor environmental conditions, my chest feels as if there is a large leather belt buckled tight around it. My fingers and and toes pulsate and I have noticed that my face has grown pale. My vision is clouded and I can constantly feel my heart beating. The stress of the world seems to have nested upon my skinny left shoulder.

I have noticed that I am not alone. I have noticed many suffering from similar ailments and running around desperately searching for relief (yoga, meditation, eating, drinking, consuming). People do not seem to be getting along, wherever I look another relationship has ended, another person is struggling to survive and another person is experiencing some kind of transformational event that is threatening the sanity they seem to be slowly loosing. All around me people seem squeezed. I can see it in their eyes. I can hear it in their voices and I can certainly feel it in my gut. Human beings are fighting for their lives.

I have heard it said that 2012 marks a monumental time in the history of our planet. Thousands of years ago Mayans have predicted that this will be a time of great transformation that will result in change that our human minds can not currently fathom. Physics believes that the closer time gets to an end the faster it gets- time speeds up. Along with the sppeed up of time comes a kind of constriction and anxiety within all those who are subject to this elevated blood pressure of time. Animals (humans) become more frantic and stressed, things start to break down and people feel squeezed. Like there is not enough minutes in the day. Chaos can ensue.

It is my belief that the earth is experiencing symptoms of this larger breakdown. The sky is literaly falling and some see it and others have managed to distract themselves enough so as not to have to deal with it (but they still feel it). Others feel the squeeze. There is a pressure upon us that seems to be forcing us into submission, to the transformation that needs to occur within ourselves and upon this planet. Maybe being squeezed is not so bad. Maybe I can look upon my pulsating toes and finger tips as a gift from the universe in which I have accidentally found myself living. Maybe I am being forced to awaken to what is going on around me, outside of me- and change what is taking place within me. After all, physics tells me that I am just a microcosmic reflection of a larger macrocosm…if I can un-squeeze myself- than maybe I can un-squeeze the world.