“Be steadfast in the performance of your duty, O Arjun, abandoning attachment to success and failure.”
“Therefore, giving up attachment, perform actions as a matter of duty because by working without being attached to the fruits, one attains the Supreme.”
-Bhagavad Gita
I am trying to read and understand the Bhagavad Gita, I don’t know why. It seems like a good idea right now. I once read it aloud to my friends, with a head full of acid on the way home from a music festival in the early 2000s, but I don’t remember anything about what was in it or what it means. I remember seeing Hare Kristnas handing out the text at pretty much any hippie music festival I ever went to, and I always ignored them. I took one of their books at the mountain jam festival one year, maybe it was 2007 or 08. That was the paperback copy I read on the car ride home from Hunter NY.
I’ve read 4 chapters so far from the Gita and I have come to an understanding of one concept that Krishna is trying to explain to Arjun on the battlefield : work or duty without an attachment to the outcome. Work and or duty for the sake of the practice, not an end result. That’s what I want to do with writing.
This Columbia med student that works here at the rehab I’m in wanted to read my writing, after I had talked about it as a coping mechanism the other day . Later he ran into my room with some very complimentary things to say about the stuff being both profound and funny , and I appreciated it. He told me I should write a book. I don’t know that I’m not already writing a book, in little bites and bits. I have no idea what the outcome of practicing writing is, I try to do it just to do it.
Of course I would like to write a book, I don’t know if I could, and maybe I’m afraid to try. I know I have many pages of writing up here on my blog that could perhaps be repurposed into some kind of longer linear story.
There are all of these articles on my Medium front page about marketing your writing to go viral, get rich and famous. I don’t really read that stuff because it seems very plastic and click bait- like. It’s about an outcome (that being wealth in this case.)
I think about writing in the way that a jazz musician considers improvisational music, I want to get myself and my fears out of the way so that it can just come through me. When I am practicing regularly that is how it is, flowing through me, and I don’t have to think too hard.
This concept from the Gita also makes sense to me when I think about the seeking of deeper meaning in life. I don’t think the point of that is arriving at any conclusion, and the seeking is the finding. The journey is the destination.
Why am I digging around all of this Eastern spiritual shit? I don’t know, I just think it’s going to be useful in trying to maintain a positive sober existence. I’ve seen this kind of seeking really help people get better, and I need to get better (I’m fucked up). Maybe I’ll fuck around and get enlightened.
I don’t have any idea where anything is going, and for once I can live with that.
