Useless

The main thing in life, I guess, is to have a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning, so to speak.  You need to successfully achieve that absurd state of being, the one where you are able to live meaningfully in an essentially meaningless universe.

It probably doesn’t really matter what you do, just so long as you do something that seems like it matters.  And presumably, the best way to do that is to have it matter to someone else, so they can convince you that it actually does.

There are lots of ways to do this. 

You can aim high and work at a non-profit whose mission is to save the world.  You can find satisfaction in the middle with a decent job that pays well enough for you to have fun with family and friends.  You can probably even achieve the desired state by bottoming out as a drug addict just so long as you’re addicted enough to care sufficiently about the drugs you’re addicted to.

I myself have had some success in lowering my standards sufficiently so that whatever little bit I do convinces me that it’s enough.  The problem with this is that it’s hard to maintain the illusion for very long, especially since the bar inevitably falls lower and lower.  As soon as it’s sufficient for maintaining my self-esteem that I, say, do some yoga, clean the house, and read a book on a given day, I find that subsequently, it’s enough to just read a book.  And then, soon, it’s a magazine.  And then, the newspaper.  And before you know it, I try to be satisfied simply surfing cat videos on the web—and even for me, that’s not enough, which requires restarting the process all over again.

They say that the key to happiness in life is to commit to something larger than yourself; I tried devoting myself to LeBron James; sorry to say it didn’t work.

Painful

I am 59 years old and have had a daily Ashtanga yoga practice for more than 18 years. 

During this time, I have experienced all sorts of aches and pains and have tried to work through them, using those physical sensations as a means to examine my experience and response to it. 

I’ve also had to modify my practice due to various injuries, including sprained wrists, bruised ribs, skinned knees, and jammed fingers.  My “higher self” seeks to accept each injury as a “gift” that provides me the opportunity to become more aware of my body; of course, I struggle to balance this aspiration with the frustration that follows from not being able to do things that I can do when I’m healthy.

For the past several months, I’ve been dealing with a couple of nagging pains that are bedeviling me and forcing a re-evaluation of what the yoga practice is; I’m not ready to give it up, but I am wondering what my practice will look like in a year or ten if things don’t change.

The first is a chronic pain in my left (bad) knee coming into and out of the lotus (heel to navel) position.  Oddly enough, once I’m settled in the pose, it feels fine, but the transition, as I straighten my leg, has been hurting for months.  I’m starting to believe, therefore, that it’s in my head, not my knee.  I have to stop expecting to feel pain for it to go away.

The other is the result of a sprain I incurred while playing softball.  My right ankle remains swollen after almost two months and causes me misery when flexed in various binding poses like marichyasana B or D; it has also rendered janu shirshasana B, where you sit on you heel, impossible.  The slowness of my recovery is what’s bothering me most; I can live with the pain it’s temporary.

If this is my life now, though, that hurts.

Ad Hominem

When I do philosophy with 5th and 6th graders (or, for that matter, college students), I like introducing them to informal fallacies, especially the ad hominem fallacy, which is the infamous rhetorical error of attacking the person rather than their argument. 

I illustrate the ad hominem fallacy with the following example:

Suppose I were to present the following argument:
“Since yesterday was Monday and tomorrow is Wednesday, therefore, we can conclude that today is Tuesday.”
An ad hominem response to that argument would be:
“Oh yeah?  Well, you suck!”

Once students have grasped the concept of the ad hominem, we can then point out in class when someone commits one. If someone calls someone else “stupid” for believing, for instance, that cats are superior pets to dogs, we can share one of those lovely “learning moments” and explore a more effective way to respond to the argument in favor of cats.  It doesn’t take 11 and 12 year-olds long to get into the habit of identifying the ad hominem fallacy and only slightly longer to develop argumentative strategies that avoid it.

By contrast, more than a year into the current U.S. Presidential campaign, pretty much all the candidates and most, if not all, of the political pundits routinely, if not exclusively, employ the ad hominem in reference to the candidate they don’t support.

Trump, for instance, calls Hillary a “liar,” “crooked,” and “the devil.”  She refers to him as “racist,” “incompetent,” and “flamboyant;” (and, while these may be true, they still take aim at him rather than his arguments (whatever they may be.)

It’s even more obvious when you consider both candidates’ supporters.  I would defy most Trump voters to articulate the justification for even one of Hillary’s policies (even articulating one of her policies would be a stretch); and the main reason Hillary voters reject Trump is because of his character, not the reasons for his positions (assuming he has any).

Conclusion: both sides suck!