Renounce and Enjoy

"You must not worry whether the desired result follows from your action..."

Must be pithy phrases week here at l'astronave...
Yesterday, "Be both lost and at home".

Today, "Renounce and enjoy" riffs on the same idea.
Be lost = to be without fixity in the corporeal world
Be at home = being at ease in one's self, anywhere

Both = and

I know the phrase from Gandhi famously summing up his life "in three words" by quoting the Bhagavad Gita.*

About detachment (related to renunciation), Gandhi said:

“By detachment I mean that you must not worry whether the desired result follows from your action or not, so long as your motive is pure, your means correct.
Really, it means that things will come right in the end if you take care of the means and leave the rest to Him.”

--Quoted in Gandhi the Man: How One Man Changed Himself to Change the World, by Ecknath Easwaran [PDF here]

(For me, that second sentence is optional: I don't have to believe things will come right in/via some Cosmic way to act as I think is right.)

No Toilets, No Park. (We Can Be Excellent)

I experienced such a lifting of expectations last week--it was weird, like gravity lightened up a little.

What happened was,
at my request, a few weeks ago the City had provided trash service to the mini-park next to the thrift store, where people are living, many also running (or caught in) dangerous and illegal businesses.

I was talking to the City, I thought, about the next step in Public Health:
TOILETS!
And handwashing stations, like at outdoor festivals.
"Covid, bad," I wrote. "Cholera, worse."

Instead, boom! They sent a work crew to fence people out of the park--a giant mesh cage went up in a couple hours, enclosing the little patch of earth shaded by pines.

Of course the City didn't provide porta-potties for the people, or give them any place to go. They moved across the street, to the shaded portico of a vacant building.

When I came to work and saw the fence, I cried. In rage and frustration and grief and DISGUST.
The fence went up during the Olympic Games, and I said to a coworker,
"Watching the Olympics, you see we can be excellent!
This! This is FAILURE."

I went away thinking maybe I'd just give up ever trying again.
Instead––weirdly––I felt lighter.
Cheerful, even.
When the worst outcome occurs, it may liberate you from expectations.

If you play this game––any game––expecting to win, you will be crushed.  Only one person gets the gold.

Sports are all about excelling and losing.
Life too, I think.

Heh, there's another pithy phrase:
Be excellent, and don't expect to win.

From George Floyd Square:

"You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world, and you have to do it all the time." --Angela Davis

(Or, I'd add, whatever you want to transform--it needn't be "the world", it needn't be political.)

Don't stop if that doesn't happen. "Possible" doesn't mean probable.

Lose Excellently

Here's another one:
Auntie's neighbor Lance is a basketball coach. (Could this guy get any more Wisconsin? I don't think so.) I was looking up his address and found his Twitter, full of coaching philosophy.
One was "Lead, even if you're not in charge."

I like that!
I've never been a leader, not in any official way.
I've always been scared of leading--scared of losing, partly, and feeling ashamed and powerless.
Or––the opposite of renunciation––scared of setting myself up with high expectations and not being able to handle losing.

Basically, I've been
SCARED OF UNPLEASANT FEELINGS.

When the city fenced the park, I "lost", big time. But, a little surprisingly, I didn't feel ashamed of myself, or even pointless.
To use Gandhi's phrase, my motives were pure. (Pure? well, kinda, yeah.) And my means were correct. (Correct? Well, nonviolent, anyway.)

I felt ashamed of and grieved for "us", the humans who can't think our way out of a paper bag.
We who are so limited in our imaginations, we can only think in terms of punishment and restrictions.

We who could be excellent but cringe in hidey holes.
I do this too!
No one comes out of safe hiding by being yelled at or because they're ordered to.

I think I'm following one possible classic trajectory of aging here:  Emergence.

Loosening up, lightening up.
What have I got to lose, at sixty and upward?

I don't want to make too much of this--I am no Gandhi!
Ha. So much not.
I am less afraid to speak up, and I'm thrilled about that, but I am no energetic activist.
I am reading in bed at 7 PM.

I still hate groups and committees. I am freelance, whatever I am.
Any kind of leadership effect I might have is tangential.
Also, tiny. (Though you never know.
That's another thing to let go of: knowing for sure what effect you have.)

I'm good with that though.
I appreciate people who can work inside the system;
I'm more of a handmade signs person.

This is another beautiful thing at George Floyd Square, which is enormously handmade. It is a traffic cone marking off sacred space, to keep traffic off.

The square is going to lose, for sure, when the City comes to take it down. (End of August?)
But it is being excellent.

__________________

Speaking of losing: did fencing the park help?
It did not.
On Sunday afternoon, less than a week after the fence went up, a man murdered another man on the street in front of the thrift store.

And still no toilets.
_________

*Gandhi's summation reminds me of Rabbi Hillel summing up scripture:

“That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary — [and now] go study.”