But back to the beginning.
The first time that I read The Tao of Pooh was about 15 years ago, when I was in middle school. Sixth grade, perhaps; it's difficult to remember exactly. It was on the shelves in the sixth grade homeroom, at least, which was also the English room. (I attended a tiny, Catholic K-8 school for grades 6-8. One class per grade, generally something like 8-18 kids per class. Each grade had a teacher, and for grades 6-8, each grade's teacher also taught particular subjects. We also had a hallcafegymnatoriumway.) Those shelves housed a very random, unorganized collection of books that I don't think I ever saw anyone other than me lay a finger on. Granted, I was That Kid who would be assigned to read the first chapter of a book for that night's homework and finish the entire thing, so when I would inevitably finish in-class work early or what-have-you, I was actually often sent off to the other part of the room to find something to keep myself occupied.
I'm not really sure how The Tao of Pooh ended up in that collection, which was generally more along the lines of Johnny Tremain and various YA Holocaust fiction. I don't know if the teacher, who was smart and well-intentioned but often frazzled (our class, in particular, was sometimes prone to hooliganism), even knew it was there. In hindsight, it seems like a bit of an unexpected find in a Catholic institution where group prayer was a daily activity and attending Mass was a weekly occurrence but theological teaching wasn't particularly rigorous. Not as rigorous as I would have liked, at least -- but as I've already mentioned, I was That Kid.
In any case, that was my first exposure to Eastern philosophy. And it was eye-opening to me. It was the first time that I had ever seen a spiritual way of life that involved no mention of God or Jesus. Not a single Biblical reference. There was no enshrined deity, no ritualized worship. Just thoughts on how to be a good person.
It didn't have an immediate effect on me. But I'm pretty sure that set the ball rolling for my seeking of spiritual maturity.
I'd grown up with a very self-imposed religiosity. Baptized Presbyterian to the triumphant tones of Kate Smith's "God Bless America" (which I'm sure that the pastor, who, conversely, I am not sure had ever had an Asian parishioner in his entire life, sincerely thought to be very appropriate), I then attended Lutheran Sunday school and services weekly. Alone in bed, I would say my prayers nightly. My most oft-read book, once I could read, was probably my Precious Moment's children's Bible. And I determined that the upholding of my moral character (though only my own, I wasn't in the business of anyone else's) called for abstention from alcohol and romantic relations before marriage.
We've already been spoiled for how the alcohol part turned out, but hopefully that doesn't ruin the story.
Religion was never actually discussed at home, though. I can't remember a single word about God or religion ever passing between myself or either of my parents. We very much celebrated the secular versions of Easter and Christmas. We didn't even say grace. And once I switched to Catholic school in sixth grade, we stopped attending our Lutheran church, as I was now evidently getting my recommended serving of religion from another source. At school, eager to be part of this new standard of moral behavior, I dutifully crossed myself and learned the words to all of the prayers and creeds.
That was the background for when my life began to change, as many people's lives do, in those sensitive years of young adolescence. Through school (and, in a couple years' time, the internet), I started to meet people who weren't part of my usual milieu of white, middle-class, rural or suburban, generic American Christian heteronormativity. Reading old journal entries, back when I kept traditional paper journals, it was when I began to experience distressing derealization and depersonalization episodes, precursors to the anxiety episodes that would later plague me. I developed an inexplicable curiosity about stories that would occasionally pop up about gays and lesbians, though I also experienced an equally inexplicable nervousness that my entirely innocent curiosity would be discovered.
And though I continued to quietly stand or sit or kneel with respect, I slowly stopped crossing myself or saying words that had only been coming out of my mouth because everyone else was saying them.
"Inner Nature, when relied on, cannot be fooled. But many people do not look at it or listen to it, and consequently do not understand themselves very much. Having little understanding of themselves, they have little respect for themselves, and are therefor easily influenced by others. But, rather than be carried along by circumstances and manipulated by those who can see the weaknesses and behavior tendencies that we ignore, we can work with our own characteristics and be in control of our own lives. The Way of Self-Reliance starts with recognizing who we are, what we've got to work with, and what works best for us."-The Tao of Pooh
I think that The Tao of Pooh planted a tiny seed within me of self-discovery and self-determination. Or maybe it just expanded the directions in which a pre-existing seed could already grow, as I was already pretty set on determining things for myself, if within a limited context. Spiritual self-examination remained a constant within my life, though not particularly at the forefront of things. By the time I was in high school (also Catholic), I was pretty sure that I might possibly be agnostic, and I mentioned that I wasn't a Christian at home one day, the first attempt at a religious or spiritual conversation that I can ever remember having.
A laugh. "Of course you are."
Needless to say, that was the end of what was also the last such attempt.
Over the subsequent years, I continued to move further from Christianity. I spent more and more of religious services (attended for work, for the most part) in respectful silence. One trip back to the old Lutheran church, where I was attempting to play the part of a normal parishioner, memorably had a sermon on faith trigger an anxiety attack. Overall, though, I stayed in that somewhat amorphous, agnostic-ish, "spiritual but not religious" territory. Nothing prodded me to move from there until I joined the agnostic huddle during a cultural mapping exercise during my graduate school orientation. The others in the group agreed upon describing their basic attitude as "I'm not sure if God exists, but I'm kind of scared of the possibility that He doesn't."
And that didn't describe me at all.
Having also been inspired to more spiritual rigor by the thoughtful personal writings of a respected online acquaintance of mine who had journeyed from childhood Catholicism to agnosticism to orthodox Catholicism, I went through a period of actively trying to determine what lay within me -- what was there that I perhaps hadn't brought myself to directly and honestly look at until then. And I when I admitted my own atheism to myself, I felt such a sense of -- for lack of a better word -- spiritual relief. The relief of honesty with myself.
"When you work with Wu Wei, you put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. No stress, no struggle. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square hole and the square peg into the found hole. Cleverness tries to devise craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don't belong. Knowledge tries to figure out why round pegs fit round holds, but not square ones. Wu Wei doesn't try. It doesn't think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn't appear to do much of anything. But Things Get Done."-The Tao of Pooh
It's a little funny, looking back now, at what an influence a Bear of Little Brain had on someone who was That Kid. Or maybe it didn't. Perhaps things would have turned out pretty much the same if I'd never found that thin, battered paperback on the bookshelf in the sixth-grade homeroom. Maybe I'd still have spent the other afternoon happily flopped onto my back in the grass, staring up into the cloudless blue sky whose end was beyond my reach, feeling small and amazing and happy. But humans do like their narratives, and I think that that tiny book had a definite place in mine.
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