The point of life is farting around
Life's about the small things. Small, silly, delightful, everyday things.
I've been in a depressive hole lately. It's fine; the woe comes and goes. As I've hoisted myself back onto ground level, I've started remembering how to be content. How to find joy in the little things again.
In the process, I've landed on a new goal: live like Kurt Vonnegut sending a letter.
Stick with me here.
Stay farting, stay living
Kurt Vonnegut had a simple, joyous take on life: humans are "dancing animals" and we're on this planet "to fart around". No grand plans, no profundity. Enjoy the moment, shake your thing. That's enough.
Vonnegut explained this with a simple story back in 2004. He needed to buy an envelope and, well, it kicked off an adventure:
I take these messy pages down two flights of stairs to the ground floor where my wife works and I dance on the way down. This is very good exercise. And I’m doing some pretty good stuff, I must say.
And my wife hears me going past her work station and she says “Where are you going?” And so I say “I’m going to buy an envelope.” And she says “One envelope? Why don’t you buy 100 envelopes and put them in a closet up where you work?”
And I pretend I haven’t heard her.
Vonnegut relays his trip to the store: asking someone about their dog, giving firefighters a thumbs up as they drive by, talking to people in line.
He talks about the woman behind the counter at the post office, who he’s secretly in love with. He gets his stamps. Then:
Here I’ve got what was once an empty envelope full of pages. It’s addressed. It’s become an animal raring to go. It’s got stamps on it. What a transformation. This is no ordinary envelope anymore.
I go to the mailbox, my friend on the corner, the big bullfrog, and I feed it the envelope. And it says “Ribbit”. It swallows it. And I go home.
And I have had one hell of a good time.
And let me tell you: we are here on Earth to fart around. And don’t let anybody ever tell you any different.
Sure, Vonnegut could’ve just bought 100 envelopes. But the point isn’t the postage: it’s everything he gets to see, do, and feel on the way. He gets to move around – to dance (he says we're "dancing animals", after all).
He gets a mission. He gets to experience the world, just as it is.
You get to experience this
In George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo, Roger Bevins III lingers between life and death after committing suicide. As he’s dying, he realises he wants to live – to keep on experiencing all the beautiful things life has to offer:
Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.
We're made to experience the world just as it is. But it's that naturalness that makes it easy to take for granted.
It's not that we can see sunsets – we get to see them.
Everyday, we can smell fresh ground coffee, hear the peculiar trills of birdsong, touch crinkly leaves. Just this morning, a crew of kookaburra laughed by my house. Have you ever heard a baby kookaburra learn to laugh? It sounds demented. It's incredible.
This stuff? It's all incidental. A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a sunbeam reading a book – legs propped up on a shelf – and Tim, one of my cats, hopped on my lap and started to purr.
It was exquisite: the warmth of the sun, the gentle weight of Tim, the subtle tense of muscle to support him as he sprawled down my legs, the vibration and hum of his purrs, the softness of his fur (and I can't overstate how soft Tim's fur is). All of it at once but each feeling distinct. It was, in one moment, a "grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing".
It was just a random Saturday morning in September. A bright winters day in country Australia. And countless other people were having countless other moments of their own.
You get to experience this. All of it. Whenever you like.
Seeing gooder
In many ways, it comes down to what you can perceive. You're having an experience – how aware of it are you really?
Abraham Maslow cooked up a hierarchy of needs for people. You've probably seen it: a pyramid of worldly concerns with shelter, food and water at the bottom and self actualisation on top. You start with the basics and, over time, work towards your truest and best self.
In his book Motivation and personality, Maslow argues that self-actualised people are more attuned to the world around them. They deal with concrete realities more than labels and preconcevied ideas.
Here's how he puts it:
One of the most striking superiorities reported of self-actualizing people is their exceptional perceptiveness. They can perceive truth and reality more efficiently than the average run of people, whether it is structured or unstructured, personal or nonpersonal.
Basically, they're more perceptive. More aware. By engaging with with environment more holistically, they're able to have moments – however brief – of self actualisation.
This is an echo of how Zen Buddhism describes enlightenment. Enlightenment isn't a destination: it's a state of being you can tap into at any moment. It's already inside you. If you can focus on your breath and observe your being – which includes the world around you – as it is, you can experience enlightenment.
Enlightenment in the every day
It's about staying in the pre-reflective world. In his book Zen action/Zen person, T. P. Kasulis describes the pre-reflective world as one of without-thinking – it's a place where you acknowledge your thoughts without latching onto them (or believing that they're an accurate description of the world).
Compare that to the spiralling thoughts of depression and anxiety. The rumination, the worries, the misguided assumptions. Years ago, I was telling my psychologist that I thought the work I did was meaningless. She asked if that assumption could be coloured by depression.
I was stunned. Obviously, yeah. Definitely. But I had never thought of that. That's how deep the assumption went. That's how hard I had latched onto that particular thought.
According to Kasulis, the pre-reflective helps you stay aware of the myriad possibilities open to you in the present. Reflective thinking – applying your assumptions, labels and preconceived ideas onto the world – narrows your experiences. It simplifies and shifts you away from the immediacy of the moment.
Staying in the immediate means being aware of things as they change. Impermanence, as directly experienced, is the “presence of things as they are” or genjokoan. And by being in the present, we experience a moment of enlightenment.
Enlightenment isn’t extraordinary
Enlightenment isn’t extraordinary – what’s extraordinary, according to Kasulis, “is our persistent refusal to accept our experience for what it is”. The difference between a regular person and a Zen Master is the former’s placing their a “particular conceptual overlay” – mistaken ideas of the self, things, time – over their experiences and mistaking the overlay to objectively real in and of itself.
Both the Zen Master and the regular person both share the pre-reflective experience – it's not something unique to the Zen Master. They just stay in it more consistently, bringing none of their delusions along for the ride. They experience the presence of things as they are.
Fart for life
Look, all of that is a high falutin' way of saying what Vonnegut did at the start of this. Yeah, the pre-reflective world is a philosophical view and perception leading to self-actualisation digs into psychology.
But here's what they're saying: stay in the present. There's joy in it. You don't need optimisation or productivity or grand, sweeping goals.
None of this is easy, mind. It takes consistency, effort, dedication. And it's not something you can even force, really. It's like willing yourself to be happy or telling yourself to get confident, stupid.
This approach to life is a byproduct of you approach the world. It's a practice.
It's farting around.