A Self-Made Retreat
I’ve spent the past couple of days on Shelter Island, one of the few remaining vestiges of “old and weird” San Diego where crusty boat guys with anchor tattoos still roam a plenty like Bison in the 1700s.
Being away helps me realize so much about myself and my anxiety-inducing behavior patterns that hobble me in my day-to-day life, such as my complete and utter inability to settle into swaths of unstructured time. In my defense, I was never taught to relax. I was taught to work because that’s how you earn everything — money, love, everything. So yeah, relaxing. Not a skill over here.
The underpinnings of this are pretty deep and spiritual. I grew up around the ideas of yoga and dharma. Yoga is not something you do in $190 stretchy pants, it’s your life practice. My father always refers to himself as a karma yogi, karma being work or “your doing.” As opposed to seva yoga, for example. Seva is “service,” so the practice or yoga in this case is serving others, the planet, etc.
The overarching idea here is one of paths to liberation or moksha, freedom from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Each of us is a yogi of some ilk, and our respective yogas are our pathways out of the tyranny of mrityu loka, what we call earth, the realm of the dying.
I realize this might sound bleak to cultural outsiders, but I find it rather empathetic. It both acknowledges human suffering and contextualizes mortal life as a mere blip on the eternal journey of the soul. Even though planet earth and living on it is characterized a certain way, it is special because, according to Hindu philosophy, you’re here because your soul is on a purposeful journey to learn or attain something only possible here.
Like my father, I identify as a karma yogi, so my path very much runs adjacent to the work I do. This is great most of the time because it imbues my life with a learning and doing spirit. It’s horrible when you’re tired though and need to be still for the sake of your body and well-being. I just recently tried to work my way out of burnout for the millionth time and it didn’t work, hence the mini-vacation.
I can’t always go on those though, so I gravitate toward activities that force me to surrender, like writing or roasting coffee beans. Both require letting go of my grip on time because I never know how long either will take. Sometimes when I fire up the roaster to do a roast, I end up doing three. Before I know it, it’s dark outside. Time has flitted away and surprise — it didn’t kill me.
