Actually, Winning isn't Everything

Competition.  Many things speak to me these days about this culture of Me First, Me Win . . . so I assume it is an area of my perception I am opening to, uncovering the competitiveness of my own conditioned mind, which was largely unconscious for most of my life.  Women compete in shoes, their kids' accomplishments, their baking, on and on.  I've heard that men just can't stand to have an older car than their brother-in-law, but men are upfront about being competitive.

How it applies to Mimi Me just now?  I am in gear to apply for a local arts grant.  This grant is, of course, competitive, not just a lightning streak from the sky like every artist would like.  But you don't know how to pour effort into it.  You have no idea who the judges will be, and they've had some people whose judgement I personally did not respect after listening to them at the panel hearing.  It's always been three of them, say a slam poet with a high school education, a creative writing teacher/published poet, an academic teacher and critic.  (I need to remember to put in a certain poem I have that is spoken in a dub rhythm; a slam poet might like it.)  

Half my friends want to win this, since, I am happy to say, I hang around with a bad crowd.  We hate it. We sweat our entry and walk it in at the last minute.  Months later we crowd into the panel hearings and hear our work judged 1-1-1, "not competitive."  Ow!  It ruins your day.  At least one day.

And competition goes against my own appreciation of a life that is non-famous, humble, not striving, you know.  Wun slowly gets better this way with age and practice, not cleaning for company so much.  Because what you get to see as you gain awareness is that nothing external will make you happy.  One year I won one of these, got a letter, and I remember clearly that the joy lasted about an hour.  You can't go around in ecstasy.  Actually, that relates to the subject of my last post, enlightenment. 

Anyway, deadline coming, so I will sign off, and might post less until September.  (Did I say the grant involves a handsome amount of money?  That's another story.)  You can subscribe by e-mail over on the right if you want to know when I come out of it.

What is it with people anyway? or On Winning

The largest recorded dish of tabbouleh was created on October 24, 2009 in Beirut, Lebanon. It weighed 3557 kilograms and earned a Guinness World Record. The record was previously held "by the citizens of Majdal Shams, Israel on March 21, 2008" when it made a bowl of tabbouleh weighing 2170 kg.

Intending to look up a recipe for tabouli this morning, I cam across the above on Wikipedia.  I must be working inside myself on the perennially arising desire to Achieve Something, because I keep noticing the ubiquity of efforts to Win!  Winning is big and red like that, it is yang, and yang is in the air this time of year.  I often think the bigger-better-winning neurosis is deeply in the American character, but here it is overseas.

Are we born this way?  I can't quite see winning as a survival skill, except winning a wrestling match with a bear for a salmon so you can stay alive.  Winning, achieving . . . I think lately about David Foster Wallace, the writer who had already written what many people call a masterpiece.  Now he wanted to write something more important, to surpass himself.  This is common with writers and athletes, who want to beat their "personal best."  Now Wallace is dead by his own hand. It seems he couldn't stand the pressure he was putting on himself.

Winning.  There are many high-flyers in this world who are proud of their aggressive collecting of money, real estate, women, stuff, power.  I've known of women in this category, but not many.  It's yang, masculine, testoserone-fueled.  If you asked them, "What is it that will be enough, that will satisfy you?"  I think these high-flyers would immediately say, "Nothing.  I'll never stop aiming higher" or some nonsense like that.  So here's my motto today:  Why not aim low?  Hey, maybe you'll meet your goal that way, if you insist on having one.

Born to Mosey

I see there's a book very popular among runners (people who choose to run when there's nothing chasing them) called, what else, Born to Run. A great title, and it suggested to me the title for my own autobiography, which I intend to write when nothing is chasing me. "Born to Mosey."

Mosey is an archaic word, but I will stick with it because it's the first word that came to my mind, and sticking with it is much easier than getting down Roget's Thesaurus, which I actually own in book form. That right there should tell you that mosey is an apt word for someone of my age. It is an interesting word that connotes my humble heritage. But I don't want to deviate into looking up the word's etymology and hopelessly lose track of my inspiration, I want to explain myself. Not as an apology, just - clarification.

This is a world, this world I was born into way last century, that does not mosey. Americans run, they strive, they stretch, they reach, they gain, they multitask, they dream impossible dreams. They believe in dreaming impossible dreams, which has given rise to multiple huge industries that help people either dream that way or recover from dreaming that way: personal trainers, life coaches, therapists of every description, gurus, expensive running shoes . . . as you see, the list is endless. Nevertheless, some of us, many of us actually, just aren't suited for that.

If you look at the animal kingdom, it is very hard to justify this running thing. What mature predator gallops about at full speed when there is no prey? None, unless they hear the can-opener in the kitchen, and after all, catfood is a sort of prey that's been pre-conditioned to make life easier.

TV has given us a false impression of the animal kingdom. The fact is, in the state of Nature, lions lay around in the sun until they get hungry, and they would never get up if someone else would serve them. Elephants just stand there occasionally whisking their pathetic little tails, unless someone gives them some paints. Monkeys spend a great deal of time picking fleas off one another, an activity I suppose is akin to going to the beauty parlor or going on the Jerry Springer show. But they don't run.

It was very difficult for a pale, artistic type to grow up in this culture, which was like this even before feminism told women that we could compete (a form of running) in the "real" world with men, both in sports and at work. Still, I got along okay until seventh grade, when we were put without our consent into gym class, complete with starched white one-piece uniforms like truncated sleeveless jump suits. There we were expected to perform hard things that involved a lot of hasty moving about and sweating. This was great for a handful of naturally athletic girls who went on to become cheerleaders or high divers, but some of us just liked to read, and you couldn't get excused for that. I thought then and still do that getting out of breath isn't right, somehow.

The sport that naturally appealed to me in adulthood was yoga. I liked best the prone poses, the ones you do on the floor, especially shavasana, or corpse pose, which I do not say in order to be screamingly funny. It's the truth. I was willing to go through the rest to get to those last long, slow minutes when somebody told me to Relax.

Another thing I tried during my Middle Years was Tai Chi. This was a reach for me, because you were supposed to keep moving through a series of poses that were not posted on a blackboard (okay, white board) for us readers. It should not surprise anyone that my favorite thing about Tai Chi was the pose my teacher called Wu Wei, I think it was, which involved just standing doing nothing at all. Not even intending to move. My teacher claimed that all action had to proceed for this complete non-action. But I was always just getting into it when he started us moving.

Today, I watch more active people from my comfortable seat at a kitchen window that looks out on the street. Runners, power walkers, just plain walkers briskly walking, feeling their pulse, consulting their watch, talking on their cellphones, accomplishing something. None of them seem to be enjoying themselves the way their dogs do. Dogs, now, laugh when they're out for a run. It's fun they would say, and dogs like to have fun all the time, which is why they are dogs and we are the Master Race.