Unchained feeling
 
I'm reading a book by Natalie Goldberg called Long Quiet Highway. It combines an autobiography (I love to read them) with my two favorite topics, writing and contemplative spirituality. Goldberg, who is famous for a couple of how-to-write books, tells the story of how she became a writer and a meditator.
 
I'm really enjoying this book. Goldberg is a wonderful writer, and I relate to much of what she says. Since she talks a lot about freeing oneself to write and to live, and since she is famous for her other books on that topic, I expected to feel uplifted and inspired by this book.
 
Instead, it just makes me feel sad, and I'm not sure why. Partly jealousy, that she had the courage to challenge middle class expectations in her 20s a lot more than I did, and that she had such faith in her own development as she grew. Partly a recognition that, for all the people her techniques have inspired, I have never reallly been helped by them (like everyone else, I've tried them). Partly a recognition that, for all its promise and the real changes that did happen, much of the revolution of the 60s has fizzled. (Planet still theatened by ecodisaster; women and minorities still not free; Americans still getting fatter and fatter; consumerism still rampant. Meanwhile there's even more child slavery, international sex trade, ethnic genocide than there was in 1965 Just about the only thing that's a plus is a lowered nuclear threat.)
 
Now that I'm almost 46, I consider myself part of the Establishment. It doesn't matter that I'm a pornographer or bisexual or that I go to a zendo in the mornings. I'm a homeowner, a corporate manager, a churchgoer; I consume madly (the thing I'm most regretful of). So I'm not on the outside anymore, slinging mud, yelling, protesting. Now I'm on the inside, and I have to take responsibility for the state of the world. I can't blame it on my parents' generation. My generation has had 30 years to get things right; didn't happen. The world's as fucked up as it was in 1974 when I graduated from high school.
 
So I feel sad when I read about someone growing and blossoming in the culture of the 60s and 70s. Not that I didn't do as much of it as I could at the time, and later (I'm 8 years younger than Goldberg). But I've peeked ahead in the story, and I know that for all the promise and hopes of that time, things didn't turn out the way we expected.
 
I'd like to write more on this next time -- about the letdown of now.