How to stay human

descending Mt. Fuji

Relax. In that single word is embedded every attitude that I wish to embody and that I wish to pass on. In my experience, the progressive relaxation of the mind has been concomitant with spontaneous eruptions of joy; sudden ease and depth of connection; consignment of certain darker memories to oblivion; and a heady courage that wells from nowhere, as if behind me a hundred invisible men stand quietly at attention.

Relaxation sounds pretty useful, right? Here, the contradiction: relaxation cannot be instrumental, cannot be the next step in your life plan, because relaxation is the freedom obtained from the absence of instrumental thinking. Relaxation is the freedom of knowing that one does not need to possess a certain thing, to bring about any particular event, to behave in a particular way, or to forestall some potential catastrophe. Relaxation is a state of awareness without fixation, obsession, desire, or rejection.

We live in a world that optimizes us for purposes. The objectives that we find ourselves pursuing, that we are subjugated to, are not our own—for humans can have rich, full, joyous lives with very little material wealth, and very little security. The true objectives are economic, which means that they are composed from the aggregate objectives of others. The complex of interlocking objectives encourages the implementation of a system of optimization that strives to turn us all into well-tuned objective-fulfilling machines.

This attitude of optimization is taught to us from childhood, so that we might enforce it on ourselves even in the privacy of our own minds. The attitude is disguised, insidiously, as the search for happiness and self-realization. Byung-Chul Han: “the principles of self-motivation and self-optimization allow for almost effortless domination. The subjugated are not even aware of their subjugation. They think they are free. They exploit themselves, without the need for any external compulsion, and in doing so they believe that they are realizing themselves.”

Thus people obsessively obtain skills, accrue wealth, optimize their health, fitness, and appearance, and seek out status, power, and security; ostensibly for their own benefit, but really for obscure, aggregate, economic purposes that lie beyond the comprehension of any individual.

To relax is to escape from the system of optimization. This is the only adequate response of a man cornered by machines. It contains the resolve to be faced with all kinds of threats and still dare to steal one more glance at the beautiful sky. But it implies neither sloth, nor atrophy, nor anesthesia. Relaxation is calm alertness guided by love; and as such it often induces great effort, growth, learning, and transformation.

The joy derived from relaxation is the joy of attending to each person and each moment not because you can use them for something, or because they satisfy your needs, but because you love them the way that you love a soap bubble even though it is destined to pop; because it wouldn’t be a soap bubble, couldn’t wear those iridescent swirls, if it had the fortitude to stick around forever.

But there is a skill in relaxation; the description of a state of mind is rarely sufficient as an instruction to attain it. Or—maybe there is no skill in relaxation; maybe it is the natural state of the mind, and we are but the sorry populace of an adversarial society that exploits stressed states to perpetuate its hegemony. All I know is that relaxation, skill or otherwise, cannot be taught—though it may be learned.