The absurdity of what I was contemplating hit me as I was stair-mastering away at the athletic club this afternoon, watching a TV that was showing Tiger Woods finish the ninth hole at the NEC Invitational.
For some reason I’ve started to enjoy watching televised golf tournaments. I hope this isn’t a sign that I’ve got a brain tumor. There’s no rational reason to play the game—it’s expensive, eighteen holes takes forever, you get minimal exercise—much less watch it.
But I started thinking that maybe I should cut my usual routine at the club short so I could get home in time to see Woods and Kenny Perry battle it out over the final few holes.
In other words, instead of doing something athletic myself, I was seriously considering chucking that in so I could sit on my butt on a couch and watch other people act athletically.
As soon as I realized the ridiculousness of this I vowed to hold fast to my original intention: 35 minutes on the stairmaster, a complete circuit of the Nautilus weight room, then some karate kata, Tai Chi forms, and yoga postures.
I’m 56 years old. However many years I have left to live, I’ve got to focus on living my own life—not anyone else’s. That is as true for my spiritual life as for my athletic life. It’s fine to watch sports on TV so long as the watching doesn’t interfere with my own exercising.
Ditto for “watching” other people’s spiritual pursuits via books, talks, recordings, and the like. Getting spirituality secondhand is as absurd as getting exercise secondhand. Watching someone run a 10K isn’t going to improve my own cardiac capacity, nor is learning about someone else’s search for the divine going to bring me any closer to God-realization.
After finishing my complete exercise routine and doing several errands, I got home just in time to see Woods play his final shots on the 18th hole. I didn’t feel like I missed anything important. I was happy that I’d chosen to live my own life rather than watch someone else live theirs.
I love Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance.” Here’s how it starts out:
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain.To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Well, it doesn’t seem right to end a post about living your own life with a quote from someone else. So, here’s a passage I wrote from my book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus. It’s in the “Happiness is Here” chapter.
Consider three people reading, respectively, a romance novel, a pornographic magazine, and a religious scripture. Each finds enjoyable the feeling of love, broadly speaking, that their reading material produces in them. In one person this love has a romantic tinge, in another a lustful flavor, in the last a sacred sense. But the common element between them is that they are experiencing a feeling that approximates, to some degree, the sensation they would have if they actually possessed the object of their desire.“Oh, to be swept away by the man of my dreams.” “Oh, to make passionate love to the woman of my fantasies.” “Oh, to be in the presence of my blessed God.” The feelings that accompany such thoughts, says Plotinus, are pleasurable only in a severely limited sense because what we really want are the feelings that accompany not a thought, but reality.
Ersatz feelings of the sort just described thus can become an unhealthy substitute for the real thing. It’s wonderful if reading stimulates us to find a real man, a real woman, or a real God that can satisfy our longing.
But if we remain content with, in Plotinus’ words, “the feeling produced by something one has not got,” then it can be argued that we are worse off with that false feeling. The danger here is the same sort of danger faced by a seriously dehydrated person who hallucinates that he is drinking water when a well is within his reach.
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