The Beautiful Answer

Love Ray Gun

I know. When you type it out like that, it sounds a little porny. But I have a pretty vivid imagination, and am always on the lookout for new ways to be playful with energy, to not buy into the tired old ways that many of us express our emotions. I mean, does everyone scream when they’re mad?  No. Some people steam, other people drink, while still others hug it out. 

It came to me when I was driving, as we so often do here in L.A. Some guy was riding my buper, even though I was in the slow lane, about to get off at the next exit. This type of behavior irritates me for the obvious reasons (which is that it just sucks), but also because it’s the epitome of greed. I mean, seriously? You’re so concerned with getting what you want right freaking now that you can’t, I don’t know, ease up a bit? After all, we were in bumper to bumper traffic. Not exactly the Indy 500. 

Luckily, I caught myself in the next moment. OK, so it was very little skin off my back, and who cares anyway, right? But I wanted to try something a little deeper. And for some reason, the image of a ray gun came into my mind, the ones you see all the time in cartoons blasting someone’s face off and leaving them in a cloud of ash. Then I loaded that baby up with some love pellets, planning to fire them behind me into the guy’s car. Hey, it could work, right? 

I’m sitting there giggling to myself, imagining firing away with these imaginary love pellets, and probably anyone who looked inside my mind at that moment might have thought that I was batshit crazy, but it made me laugh. I can’t be sure if this is what made him ease off my bumper in the next few minutes, but it made my commute a little easier, and a lot more fun. 

Greed Sucks

It’s been interesting over the past few days, watching the Wall Street protests in New York (or not as the case may be, if the media doesn’t feel like covering them). Though they don’t seem to be pegged to anything other than a sense of being ripped off and taken advantage of for too long, it’s important that they’re out there. 

As the recession worsens, with jobless benefits running out and health insurance and dignity merely distant memories for most people, it’s an ongoing mystery why all the stimulus money of last year, which was supposed to spur new hiring, has been mostly banked by large corporations. I guess they’re saving to pay the higher-ups their million dollar bonuses for the next five years or so. Important stuff. 

I see greed in its other aspects, too. Today, a friend of mine had to almost choke out a congratulations on my new book proposal going out to my agent yesterday (actually it didn’t come out that way; I kind of finished the half sentence for her, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt). Emotions and not saying what you want to say is a type of greed, as is not letting someone in to traffic, or even withholding love when you’re mad at your partner. 

I think we can all agree that greed sucks. But what to do about it?  I can’t single-handedly change the entire financial world, just as you can’t make everyone be nice to other people.

To reframe, I imagined myself as attached but separate — to the financial institutions, other people who may be withholding in nature, or even the concept of greed. I felt my way into it as an energy, but couldn’t even get very far. It felt very tight and clenched, somehow unknowable. I saw the threads connecting me to them as thin and slight, and I was free to move as I wished. 

When I stopped visualizing, my lungs seemed a little clearer, and the headache I’ve had all day seemed a little less intense. I don’t know how, but I want to keep working on greed, in the spots I’m blind in myself, and in the world at large. Certainly, with so many of us against the blind greed of huge corporations, we can make an impact of some kind.