GREEN TEA AND THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE

(Original Image by Toa Heftiba)

Sipping green tea instead of wine tonight. I spent the last two days with an agonizing sinus infection and had to take a number of painkillers to get me through the worst of it. I figured I needed to give my liver a break once the pain became manageable. So, here I am feeling like a responsible adult. Hahaha.

Joking aside, I’ve been meaning to cut my drinking down in the long run, from every day to three or four days a week. I want drinking to be a luxury and not a necessity, though sometimes it can be depending on the day and the devils prodding you.

Sobriety has given me a bit of downtime to think about the trajectory of my life, from birth to the church to the bottle to the typer. At the moment, it has appeared before me in four stages: creating illusions, losing illusions, escaping reality, accepting reality.

When I think of creating illusions, I’m not referring to religion per se - though religion has its own contributions. I’m more referring to one’s personal view of the world and how it should be relative to them. Take the simple example of life itself. When you’re born, you are alive. And when you are a child, you encounter various people at various stages of life. Then you start to hear the numbers… he’s 23… she’s 37… he’s 52… that old fart is 86!

At the beginning of your life, 86 years seems like forever. And you begin to think, either consciously or subconsciously, that you will never be that old… that you, of course, will be the first human being to stay young forever. You may have an early concept of Death, or, god forbid, deal with it up close and personal, but there is still a detachment between you and them. You are young. They are old. They are dead. You are alive.

This impression wanes with adolescence, usually from a traumatic event that shakes you free of the insulated microcosm your parents fashioned for you. Now, you’ve begun the slow, arduous process of losing your illusions. You learn, finally, that your precious pet does not live forever. You learn about sex, what it is and what it isn’t. You learn about your limitations, both physical and mental, and the limitations of others, including your parents, your friends, your partners and spouses, and even your children. Through an endless series of letdowns, your pristine world portrait fractures into a mosaic of failed expectations. It’s difficult to notice the progression as it occurs, but an increase in anger, cynicism, and nihilism are a sure sign that such a transformation is taking place. And let’s not forget the cliché, come-to-Jesus moment when you can’t sleep because of stress, and you find yourself staring into the mirror, no longer seeing the hopeful child you once were, but a battered, bloated, boozing belligerent that could never get his act together… but I’m getting ahead of myself, because boozing is an exercise in escaping reality.

There are an infinite number of ways to escape reality. From drinking to drugs, from movies to music, from religion to black magic fantasy novels with a glass of chardonnay and a low-lit babble bath. The escape need not be eminently destructive. It might actually be beneficial in the short term. But as a lifestyle, escape becomes stultifying. All roads lead to dead ends. All bottles empty. All books end. All water drains from the tub. And then, what are you left with? The same depressing reality, now coupled with an insatiable desire to seek out a new pleasure. And once you’re done with that pleasure, you’ll seek out another and another and another ad infinitum. Some call this living. Corporate advertisers are banking on you coming to the same conclusion, as they always have a new product waiting to satisfy your latest desire.

Now, I’m not saying consumption is necessarily bad. I will say, however, that having pleasure as the ultimate aim tends to imprison people in a hamster wheel of indulgence and burnout.

So then what? What the hell are we supposed to do to pass the time between now and the infinitely distant age of 86? Well, I’m not so sure. Hahaha. I’m no guru. But what this green tea is telling me now is that nirvana is a stone’s throw away from accepting reality. Accepting with a capital “A”. I’m not talking about apathy or pacifism or any other hippy-dippy bullcrap. And I’m not using an esoteric or circuitous context for the abnormally plain concept of Acceptance… just that it should be the goal, or perhaps the vacatur of all residual goals.

Truth is, life is often boring, unfulfilling, rife with heartaches, letdowns, and visceral tragedy that brings you to your knees in anguish. It doesn’t matter what your parents told you, or your church, or your teacher, or what you told yourself. It doesn’t matter how angry or cynical or wounded you may become as your illusions crumble. It doesn’t matter how or why you try to escape. You’re always pulled back to reality. You always come crashing down to Life on its own terms. And, if you have a lick of sense about you, you begin to realize that Life was probably always this way. Your desires and ideals had nothing to do with the damn thing at all.

To be clear, Life isn’t always lousy. It sure as hell beats the alternative. You make wonderful memories with friends and family. You have personal and professional triumphs. You can get lucky once in a while. Hey, it’s all gravy. And that’s just the point I’ve stumbled upon… Life isn’t good or bad. It just is. And the sooner we accept this, the better off we’ll be.

There… you see what happens when I trade the wine for the green tea? Tomorrow, I’ll be cooking Wagyu burgers, and I’ll be damned if I don’t crack that Coppola Cabernet Sauvignon waiting in my wine rack. I’m looking forward to it.