This track includes ten minutes of meditation practice; if that feels like a lot to you, maybe start at the beginning.
Turn on the TV, get comfy, and play this track after you’ve watched the episode: Video Makers (Season Two, Episode Twenty-Three).
P.S. If you’re curious, here you can find out why I started this project.
Mentioned in this episode: a quote which is differently attributed to A. J. Muste, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Mahatma Ghandi. And a quote from a letter from Thomas Merton to Jim Forest.
Recording Transcript (Meditation Begins at 5:46)
Hello again, adventurer!
Sadly, “federal law provides severe and criminal penalties for the unauthorized exhibition of copyrighted Adventure Time meditations” so I’ll have to cancel this meditation party indefinitely.
But for real, this is as good a time as any to say again that this project is completely unofficial and I do not own nor am affiliated with Adventure Time or Cartoon Network in any way, and this is just a fan project which I hope can introduce people to the show, or to meditation. Or if you’re already familiar with them, then to deepen your love and connection to them. And if I could hand you all a custom made drink just for you to thank you for spending this time with me, I would. But since I can’t, I encourage you to find a time to treat yourself to a thimble of milk.
Beyond my ambivalent feelings about authority and its rules, I delight in this episode. I think it provides a very sweet and honest reflection about a miscommunication between friends, about what can happen when we care about different things than the people around us, and how easily we can assume that people want exactly what we want, and see the world the way that we do. And we get a fucking adorable song by BMO about friendship. “Just hug and it’s agreed, your love will not delete.”
But, in spite of the fact that the song is titled “Friends Don’t Fight,” obviously friends do fight. And there can be important things worth fighting over in the world. I don’t think that action adventure vs. romantic comedy is one of those things, but sometimes it can be hard to tell in the moment what is or is not worth fighting for.
For me, meditation is one way I can better take inventory of what I’m investing my energy towards, what I’m caring about, and whether or not it’s aligned with my values and earnest priorities. Because sometimes it’s hard to know when to back down from a fight.
Something I’ve been saying to myself a lot these days is that “I can do almost anything I want, but I can’t do everything.” And as the last episode explored, sometimes we hit real limits. For the most part, a movie can’t be both action adventure and a romantic comedy. We do have to make real choices in the world within real constraints.
I think it’s important to think about what kinds of fighting we’re willing to engage in, and the lengths we’re willing to go to get there. I also think it’s important to set down combative postures whenever possible, which I think on a collective level, is something we as a humans really need more practice with.
This reminds me of a quote which has been attributed to A. J. Muste, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and Mahatma Ghandi: “there is no way to peace; peace is the way.”
The ends do not justify the means. The way we act in the world shapes the world into what it is, what it will be. Or as one of my local activist friends once asked, and it still rings loudly in my ears, “how can we expect equitable outcomes if we don’t engage in equitable processes?”
All of these are reflections on what it takes to imagine a world of peace. And so I’d like to conclude with another quote which has resonated for me for a half decade or so. It comes from a letter from one peace activist, Thomas Merton, to another, Jim Forest, who was “exhausted,” “dispirited,” and “weary” from the continued violence in Vietnam. Forests’ words still tragically resonate today:
“Bomb after bomb after bomb slides away from the bomb bays. For every sentence in this letter, a dozen innocents will have died today… The end of the war is beyond imagination… How is it that we have become so insensitive to human life, to the wonders of this world we live in, to the mystery within us and around us?”
And Merton replies:
“do not depend on the hope of results… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end… it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”
I know that the wars that rage around us are a much bigger deal than 2 friends fighting over what kind of movie they’ll make as they respect a defunct authority. But solving the all-too-human problem of caring across difference, of choosing peace over conflict, is not a problem we have solved.
But I hope that today, for now, we can touch some peace together. If only for a moment.
So: “check please?”
