My neighbor asked me to take a meditation class with her, and I said yes. I'd been curious about it for some time, but I was concerned I'd lose touch with my friends, and society in general, becoming unable to relate with people, as mystics, hippies, and advocates often appear.
I'd been battling with the concepts of emptiness, a lack of intrinsic meaning, and the absurd for about six years. At the beginning of this struggle, a friend suggested I read The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus. This lead to The Rebel, and to Resistance, Rebellion & Death.
I found Camus' argument enticing. For me, he basically said, "Yeah, so there are these notions like emptiness, and they're powerful, and I believe they are real, and to that I say, 'fuck off, I get it,' and we have a choice here so let's create what we want and let's want something good and let's enjoy it."
Yet, the method for living this way proved elusive. Aiming high, I started a business to end war. It was hard. I grew tired. Burned out, I started an organization for swing dancing, a seemingly trivial matter. I read all of the books on creating successful teams.
I began searching for ways to defeat the passion-to-burnout cycle, with a focus on group dynamics. Perhaps an answer is to deliberately create a culture. This search was primarily an internal one, and continued that way for a couple years.
In 2011, Willpower by Baumeister & Tierney hit the shelves. By itself, it helps us understand the importance of snack time. More importantly, it was a gateway into the new wave of cognitive psychology books. I was learning how to change the habits of my body, and how to guide an organization by learning what works for people, and I was very excited about it.
After a year of this, I met my neighbor, who had just moved in. She invited me to a community event that had a jazz band, a dance floor, a local-farm-made meal, and a psychology talk by a university professor. Yes, please.
It turned out that this professor, who was talking about habits and the latest research, has been studying Buddhism for the last 25 years, and was teaching a university class on meditation. At the same time, my yoga-teaching neighbor was putting together a pranayama course, and traveling to other cities to study Dharma; most days, we would walk to a coffee stand and talk about it.
I want to do something. I suppose that's what made me start looking into all this stuff.
Perhaps more, I've wanted to be a good person for as long as I can remember. And a good person does something important, I've perceived. But what's important? And if it's important, why aren't we there already?
And this desire to be good is probably just built into my brain, near my ears, because that's where it fit, when my ancestors needed to be good to survive the drought.
And before that. Of course. The start.
