“The world done changed so much since I been conscious.”
— Erykah Badu
The world is ending all the time, perpetually and repeatedly. We shed skin, we lose hair, we grow nails as each second our bodies quietly begin the processes all over again.
The sublime miracles we take for granted in everyday life are ones that propel us along, all without so much as ruffling a leaf. We die, and some of us leave our organs to those struggling to live fully.
We sin, repent and are born again. We scrape, exfoliate, dilate and rejuvenate. We wash, rinse, spin, hang it dry, sully it up and clean it again.
We buy it, drive it, wreck it, total it, unfold it, repaint it and ain’t it like it was when we first sighted it?
We sex it, flex it, finding heaven in it and nine months later are vexed by it.
We’re rushed, then fuss that it’s all too much.
Life, like Jazz, is one continually dimpled and belching improvisation with human beings as its riffs and our souls its solos. We are animals in need and in search of change. Self-revelation is the carrot dangling from the pole. Babbling on, we slouch toward Babylon.
It keeps us questioning, wondering, morphing and moving toward new selves, the mini-mees we hope to be.
There are diet pills, self-help manifestos, infomercials, Oprah’s glossy guide to piecing together your “best you ever,” Iyanla Vanzant’s New Age Yoruba priestess valley-leaping sing-speak, spas, retreats, getaways and hideaways.
It’s all proof that we think we need to be remade, reshaped, redone, rehatched. Do we, though?
Is it so necessary to “re” everything in our individual worlds, to throw out the well-worn only to replace it with a soon-to-be-outdated model?
Listen, there’s a natural order to the way God made us, and screwing with it too much creates unnecessary chaos and melodrama. As do our endless attempts at manipulating natural chaos, itself a reasonable component to everyday life. It bubbles up for a good reason
“Renewal” is a concept better left for drivers’ licenses, library cards, elevator registrations and other such official documents. All this recent scuttlebutt about renewing our spirits, renewing our outlooks, etc. is all so overrated. If it weren’t, it would not be a billion-dollar industry.
Why do we buy into this stuff? Perhaps because we’re socialized to look for and own the next best thing. Including newer models of ourselves.
Need renewing? Take a nap, unplug the phone, turn down the answering machine and extract that pager and cell phone from your hip. You don’t need a TV show, magazine or expensive getaway for that, do you? In other words, we need to stop making ourselves so assessable to the very things we’ll eventually feel the need to “renew” from and avail ourselves of.
Whatever happened to the days when you could go in your room, pull the blinds, sit down and take a deep breath so you could go back at it again?
I’ll tell you what happened to them — we started interfering. We began to accelerate our needs at warp speed, grabbing at what we think we cannot afford to live without. The people before us did just fine without extraneous junk, so why can’t we?
Who wouldn’t need a weekend at a spa with crystals, incense, the din of Yanni music and Deepak Chopra tapes after months living with phones vomiting out the sides of our heads while trying to be first in line for everything?
Basically, we need to relax more naturally. In doing so, we’ll certainly curtail the use of violent language toward one another. All that petty rage we incur at the sight of someone — some stranger — moving a few feet ahead of us will subside.
Our children will be kinder. The air will be quieter. There will be fewer cases of heart disease, hypertension and suicide. Shrinks will be hard-pressed to fill their appointment books. Oprah’s ratings will be in the cellar, because we’ll already have figured out the code to the “spiritually fulfilling” buzz words she so deftly plants in our heads.
Yeah, relax. That means to make yourself less of something and to do so again.
I’m off to sit in a dark room. I suggest you do the same. ©
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2001.
