I refuse Optimization

How would you live if you didn’t have to be saved?

In his paradigm shifting book, The Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore wrote that “dropping the salvational fantasy frees us up to the possibility of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, which are the very foundation of soul.”

The salvational fantasy keeps us holding close the idea that we need to be saved ~ that we are not good enough here and now but given the correct conditions and sacraments we may someday arrive at the promised land: Salvation.

The salvational fantasy permeates patriarchal consciousness. And I’m not only speaking of the halls of monotheistic religions ~ although they have schooled us very well in this fantasy. Most of our modern paradigms are drenched in it ~ including capitalistic, therapeutic, and wellness cultures.

If you press in even a little the salvational fantasy spills out: work harder, work faster, move forward, move up, meditate more, buy more things, do more therapy, pray more, practice more self-care, start a new special diet, produce more, drink more water ~ we could go on for a long time here, there are many folks and systems selling us tickets to Salvation ~ and then, maybe, someday you will finally be okay...saved enough, successful enough, worthy enough, rich enough, enlightened enough...

This is an arrival fantasy that keeps us on a perpetual quest to move forward and up, while abandoning ourselves here and now in the mess that it is to be human. And I don’t know your experience, but as I experience it: it is a mess...

...of love and sunsets and sorrow and creativity and loss and orgasms and betrayals and dreams and burials and digestive systems and changing climates and polyvagal nerves and attachments and trauma and lakes and ancestral patterns and groceries and dirty dishes and children and bombs and fungi and songs and dogs and hope and grief and emails and gods and goddesses and naps and traffic jams and disappearing forests…it is an unbearable glorious mess.

I don’t blame us for sometimes longing for a salvation somewhere above us and in the future, and most of all away from here.

And also, and still…

This mess here and now in these bodies and entanglements...this is the soil of our belonging.

What if we could drop this salvational fantasy that keeps us continually abandoning this muddy mycelial soil in a perpetual quest for ascension, transcendence, and salvation?

How would you live if you didn’t have to be saved?

I have been dropping the salvational fantasy for years, and now realize it has unconsciously taken up a new disguise: optimization. I don’t use that word much. In truth, I hate that word and have often spoken against it. And yet, I recognize now that without my knowing this fantasy has lived on in the shadows: you must be better.

But, like I mentioned, I am refusing the call for optimization.

This call is alive and loud in the culture, including (and maybe especially) in the therapeutic, spiritual, and wellness/health cultures. But I refuse optimization.

I am not going to heal every wound. Replace every bad habit. Break all the harmful ancestral cycles.

I hope the act of writing these words highlights the absurdity and grandiosity of such endeavors: of course I won’t ~ can’t ~ be optimized!

My small life exists within a long tangled story. It is a part of a web of connections that reaches across time and through space. It is a relentless becoming.

I am an ecological being.

I am animal, not a machine.

My unfolding is wild, not calculated.

I will live with my limitations and shapes.

I refuse to be scrubbed clean, to be made sterile.

To whir on without glitches or interruptions.

I will not be consistent or unchanging.

I will make peace with my big wild responsive unruly heart.

I will love tenderly and relentlessly.

I will hate where I must.

Sometimes I will be wise, sometimes I will dance with the Fool.

I will change and change and change and somehow miraculously also keep doing the same old shit.

I will walk the Earth with a scent.

With scars. With a limp.

I will live bowing down to the mycelial muddy mess of my ancestral ecological belonging.

And, since I have refused optimization, I will refuse optimization imperfectly, stumbling and babbling and sometimes accidentally drinking enough water and eating too many vegetables.

It is good to be human.