Living with it.
It's good to remember there's always another choice to make.
In college, I read East of Eden during a very anxious winter. It was the first time in my life that my brain betrayed me and I had no control over how I felt. I diagnosed myself with Seasonal Affective Disorder and created a treatment practice where I would sit under a desk lamp meant to simulate the sun for an hour each morning. During that hour, I would either do the crossword or read East of Eden—or both. An hour is a long time to sit under a desk lamp. I’m still not sure how much the makeshift light therapy helped.
But reading East of Eden may have done something. I didn’t realize when I picked it, but it’s a relatively spiritual book. The moral philosophy of the novel centers around the Hebrew word “timshel” and the various translations of that word that have appeared in different versions of the Bible over time. Is the word a command to rule over sin? Or does it imply that triumph over sin is fated? The novel’s take is that the word is describes our free will—that we get to choose whether we rule over sin or let sin rule over us, as Cain did in the Bible story from which the novel takes its title.
I’ve always loved the light, cyclical way that yoga approaches the topic of free will, more than the Judeo-Christian ideas I learned earlier in life. Yoga asserts that you can always make the next right choice. You can begin the practice of yoga again right now if you’ve made a mistake—just try to do the appropriate thing this time around. Which is so different than what happened to Cain in the Bible, who was cast out of his home and set to wandering forever as a consequence of his choice. You can’t help but feel the weight of that—what an anxious way to live.
After my friend Nick passed away, I would spend time with his daughter, going rock climbing and then getting food or boba tea on the way home. I remember how difficult it was for her early on to choose what she wanted to eat or drink. Often, she’d express worry about getting something she didn’t end up liking. I would think: choosing a drink you don’t like doesn’t matter at all. We’ll just get another drink. To my mind, the stakes were incredibly low, but she felt the weight of even those simple choices.
But in yoga philosophy, you can’t choose wrong because each choice leads you somewhere and then you’re in a new place and you’ll have another choice to make. It reminds me of a poem I love called Judas Iscariot Crushing Double Dels, which is all about how the work of being a person is finding a way to live with the choices you’ve made. I think we do that best by inhabiting the present fully, without the fear of being cast out of Eden.