Nowhere to Look

We dig through the snow
for something or somebody
and fall asleep, lost.

Here in Halifax, we got an awful lot of snow dumped on us by a blizzard yesterday. I was going to take a picture of it, but it could never be anywhere near as good as this one Alison took. I don't know exactly how many inches there were. This is not a weather report. But there are piles of it everywhere, making walking difficult and fort-building easy.

I was attempting the former yesterday in the middle of some of the heaviest dumping, as I had to pick up my bass guitar from the music store where I'd left it for some neck adjustment. Psychic Fair (= The Lodge, but with Mike O'Neill replaced by frontman extraordinaire Josh Salter) had a show to play in Dartmouth last night, so it was important to get my bass back.

Unfortunately, the store was closed due to the bad weather. I kind of flipped out a little, pulling repeatedly on the locked doors as if breaking the lock would somehow turn the store's lights back on and bring its employees up from the basement, where I was sure they were hiding from me.

Didn't work. So I trudged home through the deep drifts and blowing powder, wondering how Jacob's Lounge would respond that night to a bassless Psychic Fair. The show was cancelled in the end, so I never got to find out.

But the bleak, desperate flavour of my walk through the blinding whiteness made me think a lot about the constant search outside myself for some kind of contentment or meaning that goes on in my mind. I've seen it referred to in Buddhist literature as "grasping," which strikes me as a pretty apt term for it. It's an almost universal human failing, and it always leads to suffering.

Generally, I think of myself as fairly independent and able to find my own reasons for doing things. But lately it keeps coming to my attention that this is not strictly true, and that in fact huge parts of my life's motivation, when examined thoroughly, end up being about the search for some reward beyond the enjoyment of the task at hand. Specifically, in my case, that reward seems to mostly take the form of approval and admiration from other people, real or imagined.

That's a really ugly thing to find out about yourself, but I have to admit its truth. It's probably the biggest reason why I had to get off Facebook. That world is virtually designed to encourage self-invention and -assessment based on the validation and approval of others. I guess it's arguable whether keeping a blog is any more discouraging of those tendencies, but I feel like the relative infrequency of posts and limited readership make it at least slightly less insidious. Maybe if I were really concerned about it, I would turn commenting off. I don't know. What do you think?