We humans, we're always thinking and worrying and planning and remembering and imagining and predicting and fearing and hoping and all that mind shit. There's this constant stream of thinking, thinking, thinking. All our bodies is do is carry our heads around. No, strike that - all our bodies do is support our heads while we sit somewhere and engage in almost anything that isn't related to the bodily living thing that is - tautologically - embodied life.
So it's no wonder that we don't have a clue what life is like without this crazy mental story-telling going on the whole damn time.
When you are engaged in something, like that teamwork the other day - in the heat with the sweat and the itchy nettles and the muscles strain and the need to balance a huge forkload of vegetation over your shoulder as you march from here to there, then you inhabit for a time at least the flesh and blood viscera of yourself. Language and thought are pared down to the minimum. And what you experience is a different kind and quality and flavour of desire and pain and pleasure that is less acute than those of, say, drugs and sugar and sex and shame and the usual realm but while less acute no less potent. It's like they inhabit the entirety of the self... like a watercolour wash rather than one vibrant splodge. And there's a more intense version that comes with the acknowledgment - the embodied acknowledgement - of physical competence. I was going to say mastery, but that's too extreme - competence is enough. This whole me is up the the challenges that this day has set for me. Achievement too has it's distinct sense of pleasure.
Now, a beaver building a dam; a wren its nest; an antelope reaching the distant watering hole; the collie herding sheep; the cat catching the thread - why not, why should they not be filled with that embodied pleasure? For them, it is not silenced or shrouded or overshadowed by the ongoing dialogue of thinking thinking thinking. It is there, to be felt. Ripe for experiencing.
More so, the thrill of the kill or the escape from predation. Life! The whole body screams, For another day, there is life!
Perhaps, if we are not cynical and twisted and planning and fearing, being alive is a pleasure in itself.
We are the losers in this scale of pleasure. We, wanting more and more and unable to feel the greatest joy there is: that the heart beats, boom-ba-boom, and the blood pumps and the nerves tingle with the vitality of sheer being.
Of course, right now, I am tired, have a headache and am already dreading tomorrow. But, maybe, in meditation, I can slip into being and let the glow of not being dead yet enliven my spirits.
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