When you pray, move your feet (And when you heard proverbs....well...)
(I just got finished with my first entry for LJ Idol. Hooray for procrastination!)
I read the topic for this week and I began to panic, I had no idea what to write about, but ultimately I got to thinking about prayer and confession and all those things that as a Taoist I hardly ever do. So let me confess something:
I’m going to come out and say this, and it might make me sound like an ass but I hate proverbs. I actually hate clichés, quotes, and just about anything meant to be inspirational, uplifting, or heartwarming. It’s not that I really have an issue with the intent behind things like “when you pray move your feet”, or “silence is golden” or (and this one is a personal most hated) “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” it’s just that there is this nit picking part of my brain that can’t get beyond questions like “Who said and/or wrote that to begin with? And when? And why? And how can I properly appreciate that without context?”
I’m not trying to say that I don’t appreciate the sentiment; I just hate the concept of one sentence statements that are supposed to be meaningful. Maybe it’s my own fault, maybe; just maybe, I am a cold hearted unsentimental ass. But I’m more inclined to think it’s because to me it feels like the McDonald-ization of meaning. Let me put it this way, if someone is sincerely trying to give you advice, or make a point, or lift your spirits, or impart some truth, are they really going to be able to do it in a short quote from the Bible, or the Tao Te Ching, or Oprah, or wherever?
When I hear someone quote a proverb I tend to feel like they have set me up with the promise of a nice dinner and then come home with a couple of big macs and been pleased with themselves. It’s not that they don’t mean anything, at least most of them did at one time, but now they have been triumphantly trumpeted out of the mouths of so many people so many times that in my mind they’ve all become equivalent to words like “nice” and “stuff” and every other word your high school English teacher marked in big red ink on your essays.
A big part of my issue is that I love writing, I love words, I love listening to people talk, I love listening to people’s ideas about just about anything. I am utterly obsessed with written and verbal content, and when someone says something like “follow your heart” it’s a letdown.
For example, I will call my mother which I do a lot, and I will tell her about some annoyance, or some unpleasant event, or something going on in my life, and she will respond with “If you can’t say somethin’ nice don’t say nothin’ at all.” And I will roll my eyes, and sigh, and bite my lip, and bite my tongue because if I say something about how utterly ridiculous that is, then I will get told some other meaningless phrase, possibly from a precious moments card or some book she read back in the 60’s and I will want to scream.
I didn’t want to turn this into an essay about prayer, or religion, because I knew that inevitably that would become a cliché rant, just like all the cliché rants about religion I’ve heard my whole life, and living in the buckle of the Bible belt I’ve heard a lot. At least, hopefully, this has become something a little less cliché, if not any less rant-y.
I read the topic for this week and I began to panic, I had no idea what to write about, but ultimately I got to thinking about prayer and confession and all those things that as a Taoist I hardly ever do. So let me confess something:
I’m going to come out and say this, and it might make me sound like an ass but I hate proverbs. I actually hate clichés, quotes, and just about anything meant to be inspirational, uplifting, or heartwarming. It’s not that I really have an issue with the intent behind things like “when you pray move your feet”, or “silence is golden” or (and this one is a personal most hated) “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” it’s just that there is this nit picking part of my brain that can’t get beyond questions like “Who said and/or wrote that to begin with? And when? And why? And how can I properly appreciate that without context?”
I’m not trying to say that I don’t appreciate the sentiment; I just hate the concept of one sentence statements that are supposed to be meaningful. Maybe it’s my own fault, maybe; just maybe, I am a cold hearted unsentimental ass. But I’m more inclined to think it’s because to me it feels like the McDonald-ization of meaning. Let me put it this way, if someone is sincerely trying to give you advice, or make a point, or lift your spirits, or impart some truth, are they really going to be able to do it in a short quote from the Bible, or the Tao Te Ching, or Oprah, or wherever?
When I hear someone quote a proverb I tend to feel like they have set me up with the promise of a nice dinner and then come home with a couple of big macs and been pleased with themselves. It’s not that they don’t mean anything, at least most of them did at one time, but now they have been triumphantly trumpeted out of the mouths of so many people so many times that in my mind they’ve all become equivalent to words like “nice” and “stuff” and every other word your high school English teacher marked in big red ink on your essays.
A big part of my issue is that I love writing, I love words, I love listening to people talk, I love listening to people’s ideas about just about anything. I am utterly obsessed with written and verbal content, and when someone says something like “follow your heart” it’s a letdown.
For example, I will call my mother which I do a lot, and I will tell her about some annoyance, or some unpleasant event, or something going on in my life, and she will respond with “If you can’t say somethin’ nice don’t say nothin’ at all.” And I will roll my eyes, and sigh, and bite my lip, and bite my tongue because if I say something about how utterly ridiculous that is, then I will get told some other meaningless phrase, possibly from a precious moments card or some book she read back in the 60’s and I will want to scream.
I didn’t want to turn this into an essay about prayer, or religion, because I knew that inevitably that would become a cliché rant, just like all the cliché rants about religion I’ve heard my whole life, and living in the buckle of the Bible belt I’ve heard a lot. At least, hopefully, this has become something a little less cliché, if not any less rant-y.