Blog

• The Summer of My Discomfort

  It was an incredible joy and honor to get to work as Associate Director at an amazing Buddhist Arts & Activism center on Bowery for the past eight months. The impermanence that is contained within all things came to fruition and I've found myself, once again, released from employment.

  It's sort of like clockwork, at this point. Last summer I was fresh off a production design job at a Hot New iPad app. I spent a month living off my dwindling savings then high-tailed it down to the Jersey Shore where I lived with my Aunt and watched her kids in exchange for food, shelter, and endless parties. Then I moved back up to the city to start work at a Hot New eBook Company, from which I was let go three months later. 

  This summer I'm trying to break the cycle. I'm trying not to jump right back into a full time job just because I'm scared of being broke or because I feel like being 'gainfully employed' proves that I'm not a fuck-up. I'm going to try to be brave and take my own work seriously, like the jobs I've thrown myself into in the past. This summer I'm going to throw myself into myself and see what happens. I have a suspsicion that the ground will rise up to meet me.

  I'm not sure which projects will end up happening. I have new ideas every 5 minutes. Will I write advice eBooks based on my tweets? Will I make herbal tea bags with tweet-based yogi tea tags? Will I try to start submitting pieces to all my favorite blogs? Will I start a comedy blog with my gf? Will we lead improvised ghost tours in Brooklyn? Will I start a Greenpoint meditation group? Will all of these things happen? Will they be failures? Do I care? Who is the "I" that cares, and why? 

  In Buddhism, we say that happiness and sorrow are both the product of a full heart. It is our mind's tendency to break things into binaries and then elevate one while denigrating the other that makes us think sorrow is to be avoided while happiness sought after (and oftentimes hoarded, consumed). Sadness is not lack. Sadness is the reverberation of that tender part of your heart's mind at the recognition of suffering. My heart is full and I am ready to jump.