Only Trouble is Interesting

Sitting in Zeli in Pasadena, sipping a mocha reading a book on Zen. Ah, just like the good old days. The TV overhead has the news on, only with captions and the sound off. It's Paris again, in or out of jail or sick or born again or talking to Paula Zahn or whoever about her week long ordeal. Real things are happening in the world, real things that need to be addressed, but we've moved from wondering who Anna Nicole's baby-daddy is to tracking a do-nothing blonde's (with naught but a good PR firm to her name) legal woes. We invest meaning into these things. I'm wondering about troubled people in therapy (myself on occasion), I'm worried about the difficulty of relationships nowadays, the myriad mini-dramas that unfold, the longing for a different life, the fear of being boxed in, the fear of committing to something that might be limiting. The soap opera of it all, and then I remember a maxim from writing seminars: Only Trouble is Interesting. Hmmm. If this is the guiding principle in story, and we pump our heads full of story through television and film all our lives, how would this affect our basic worldview? Trouble = Drama = A Fulfilled Life? Can we take delight in mere contentment? I have heard it said recently by friends of mine that "they don't feel interesting anymore" or they've "lost touch with who they are." Caught in constant study or a daily routine of work that is somehow compartmentalized from their essential identity, they feel disconnected. Maybe this is also connected with our mobile society. Disconnected from people and places, the network of relationships that comprise our identity beyond our minds and bodies, we suffer recurring identity crises. One way of avoiding this is actually losing oneself in the workaday routine or study. But the respite is temporary. The problem is self-knowledge, self-discovery, an essentially spiritual problem, it seems. Not that study and work or anything for that mattter is divorced from the spiritual, but maybe we divorce them from the spriritual through lack of attentiveness. I wanted to say something pithy like "you can't solve a spiritual problem through intellectual pursuit alone," but maybe that's a little too Wayne Dyer. The experiences and definitions are a lot more fluid than that. The overwhelming questions remain: how do we cultivate a sense of spiritual depth and a sense of meaning? One difficulty I'm finding is that the traditional answers become stale very quickly. On an intellectual level, I would say community is of utmost importance. On the ground level, however, I find myself quickly cynical about any community I've been a part of. Not that they have nothing to offer, and not that I have nothing to offer them, but the conversations begin to repeat themselves, people return each week with the same problems. We sound like one note instruments. Not only the topics, but who will say what when soon becomes predictable, seemingly trite and obvious. Soon, things plateau out, the relationships seem shallow, the community itself strained and self-perpetuating, the same language, the same rhetoric which never lives up to reality. On the other hand, I'm also tired of being cynical and being thus divorced from community. A vicious cycle. A rambling blog. A tummy craving coffee...I'd wish you a good day, but then, only trouble is interesting...