(Host) The holiday season can be a particularly crazy one. Commentator
and Vermont Law school professor Cheryl Hanna has some thoughts on the
madness and what to do about it.
(Hanna) My life is mad – crazy
mad – like that Peter Greenway’s film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and
Her Lover. Except in my world, the remake would be called, The Cook,
the Thief, his Wife, and their Mother.
We work, we partner, we
care for others, and, once in a blue moon, we steal some time for
ourselves, because, after all, most of our time is owned by everyone
else.
And it’s trying to do so much at once without significant damage that makes modern life so comically tragic.
Just
take our role as parent. My mothering memoir would be nothing like Amy
Chua’s The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she boasts of her
uber-parenting skills – no TV, no play dates, and no drama. My memoir
would most likely be called, "The Whimpering Cries of the Sloth Mother."
But who am I kidding: I’ll never be able to steal enough time to write
it.
Recently, I did steal three days to go on a retreat. I found
myself in something called "yoga dance" with 75 other women. Loud bongo
drums played as the instructor had us throw our stress into the earth
and then reach up to the heavens to pull down our peace. And we did
this over and over again, down with stress, up with peace, working
ourselves into a yoga-dance frenzy until it occurred to me that – really
– this was yet another perfectly mad moment.
I had fallen victim
to what I now call the Zen Myth. In the 1980’s Naomi Wolfe wrote a
book called the Beauty Myth in which she argued that modern culture had
imposed an unattainable standard of beauty on women in response to their
increasing social power.
I think the Zen Myth works the same way:
As our lives grow crazier, there’s a corresponding culture telling us
that all would be well if we could just breathe and meditate, and
downward dog. Last year, Americans spent more than $4 billon dollars on
yoga classes alone.
Now, don’t get me wrong. My yoga class is
worth every penny. But the problem with the Zen Myth is that, like the
Beauty Myth, it’s just not obtainable. All the inner peace in the world
won’t make the day longer. It won’t make two family incomes less
necessary, it won’t provide paid maternity leave or reliable day care
for our aging parents, and it won’t cease the competition to raise above
average children.
And after we spend so much time cooking and
partnering and caretaking and saluting the sun, there’s hardly any time
left to lobby our employers for more family friendly policies or our
elected representatives for raising the child care deduction.
I think
the Zen Myth pulls too much of our energy inward, trying to change
ourselves, instead of outward, trying to change the world.
So
this holiday season, my new mantra will be that we are fine. It’s the
world that’s gone crazy. Yes, I’ll do my breathing exercises, but I’ll
also steal a few moments to cook up some ideas on how to make my time
with loved ones more meaningful and all our lives a little saner.
Namaste.