Self Reliance Part 3

Karma Repair Kit:
Items 1-4 

by Richard Brautigan

1. Get enough food to eat, and eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet, and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of yourself, and listen to it.

4.

I think about Richard Brautigan a great deal. Outside of his first book Trout Fishing in America I don't think he had a very wide audience. Although I can think of many merits to Trout Fishing in America, of all the books of his that I read, it isn't my favorite. After I began to read Richard Brautigan, I could not stop. Over a period of about a year, I read everything of his I could get my hands on. In those days, in those pre-Amazon, pre-internet shopping days, getting my hands on Richard Brautigan's books took me to every used bookstore from San Francisco to Cincinnati.

I suppose Richard Brautigan's impact on me was quite simply that in all the reading I did, it felt likeI was reading one continuing narrative. Whether is was his poetry, his novels or the one collection of short stories, of the twenty books I read, it felt like one narrative. I don't believe he strayed, not even in one story, not in one stanza from who he was. And although I cannot vouch for his karmic well being, I really do believe that he arrived at the silence of himself and he listened to it.

It has been explained to me that a steady gaze means a steady mind. In the stillness of self reliance, there has to be a steady mind. In this steady mind, there has to be a security in knowing that this life is the right life, this path is the chosen path and this is the only destiny worth pursuing.

If only life could be distilled down to that, to a stillness, to a given path, to a destiny. If only life was linear, if only life could start and continue along a single trajectory of destiny. This is not reality. What happens is this, the path is oftentimes obscured with living, with living with others, with novelty, with hardship, all those things in life that we call conflict in fiction.

Depart not from the path destiny has assigned. Of the two variables in that statement, depart not and the path, we generally do not have a clear idea of what they are. We may know that we cannot depart a given path. We may have a given idea of what the destiny is. These things, however, do not and should not come to us easily. Perhaps in the conflicts that arise daily, our path becomes more obvious and the destiny more heated, or maybe it's the opposite.

When we read fiction, we generally know the character and what the character needs to do to accomplish a given set of goals or desires. But reading a story about a character that moves through the day, the life or the story and simply accomplishes goals and achieves fulfillment, we are bored out of our wits. In fiction, we want a character to succeed, but not so easily. We love conflict, and without it we have no story, we have no fiction.

In life, the real one not just what's written, we may not want conflict. Conflict really does waylay us on our journey. Not all conflict is bad. When there are opportunities to pursue our passions, we must take them. When there are opportunities to maintain life, we probably have to take those too. Not everyone can depart not the path destiny has assigned when there rent to pay and a job to maintain in order to pay it.

Being in the possession of self, and having the self reliance needed to keep enough of the daily life to maintain and enough time to pursue a given destiny is perhaps the greatest challenge of our times. When faced with working toward a given artistic path, we all know that it generally is a great deal of work, discipline and the compensation is negligible. So why pursue such endeavors at all? Why leave the world of modern conveniences and constant entertainment to labor over a painting or a novel or a musical instrument that will certainly provide as much frustration as enjoyment? Chances are the artist or the novelist or the musician doesn't have a choice in it. This sort of person is compelled to do these things and the path destiny as assigned cannot be any other way.

The argument, of course, is that not everyone has a passion as such. I do not believe that at all. Everyone, everywhere, has a destiny. I realize that not everyone will be a writer, or an artist or a musician, but I feel like there are thousands of ways to express creativity. Expressing creativity is what it means to be human. I find as much (if not more) creativity in an engineer or a quantum physicist than just about everyone else. These are people who must learn a set of rules, think about these rules until it hurts and then think some more. Think until it hurts and then think some more? We all should be so lucky. Of course an engineer or a quantum physicist who thinks past the pain and comes up with something new, must write it down or illustrate it in such a way so others can understand it.

Self reliance is something we all have, must have. If we feel that we do not possess it, we simply have to tax that portion of our personality or creativity or intellect in order to achieve it. Should this proved to be a difficult task, or too difficult of a task, there is always Richard Brautigan's Instant Karma Repair Kit, Items 1-4.