Say No to the Hamster Wheel

I’ve been reading a therapy magazine; this issue focuses on grief and dying in this age of “advanced” medical technology.  The world we live in is just so different from the world even sixty years ago.  It used to be that people just died.  Now everything gets stretched out and it’s not clear at all that this works out better than the old way.  Take something like the pacemaker, which I’ve always thought of as a relatively benign and helpful device, but which will just keep ticking away for ten years, regardless of how sick the rest of the body is getting.  And nevermind the whole disgusting system of insurance that encourages putting them in folks who may or may not really “need” them.

Of course I am not saying we shouldn’t use any of this stuff or that “western medicine is bad” (a common refrain amongst yoga-types), but the system/society/culture never stops to assess where we are going and it is difficult to fight the tide as an individual.  The underlying assumption is that we should stay alive at any cost (literally and figuratively).  It seems like all of this technology and medication would make us feel safer somehow, but it actually creates more and more fear and striving to keep from change and aging, which is the essential nature of being alive.  (Sort of the same way that all of the communication technology we have doesn’t save us time, it just gives us more to do).

So this was the frame of mind I was in when I was watching t.v. last night.  Now, I am usually quite entertained by pharmaceutical commercials, especially the ones that list off all of the possible side effects and contraindications.  But last night I got creeped out.  First, the woman talking about something you can take for “inadequate eyelashes,” then prescription eye drops for chronic dry eye, then special face cream that rejuvenates your stem cells in your skin to get rid of your wrinkles.  Life will be good if we can just take something for everything we don’t like and make it go away.  Just thinking about it makes me tired.  (I’m sure there’s something I can take for that).

So this brings us to some of my favorite yoga topics.  We were talking about abhinivesha (fear of death) just a couple posts ago.  And satya, which we can think of as practicing being in reality.  Do we really want to spend all of our energy trying to fight reality?  Because that’s what we’re doing.  Now, it’s important to distinguish between acceptance and resignation.  As someone who can easily slip into Eeyore mode (oh well, there’s nothing I can do about it anyway), let me be clear that’s not what I am recommending.  Yoga has a lot in common with that Serenity Prayer—you know, changing what you can, accepting what you can’t.  But where do we draw the line?  It seems to me that when I can feel myself getting on a hamster wheel, that’s a good sign to stop and check in.  I don’t want to live my life on a hamster wheel.  And, despite all my conditioning, I really don’t want to just avoid everything uncomfortable or unpleasant.  Partly because even with all the eyedrops and creams, it is futile, and partly because I am a human being and I actually want to have the experience of being a human being, even though sometimes it scares me.