FilmOnDeepWater

Indulgence
18 September 2000
Portola Valley, CA                                                                                 

What does it mean to "indulge”?  I know it comes from indulgere, meaning “to be complacent, to yield, to concede”.  In our culture most of these words are bitter ones to bite on.  Another artifact from the Puritans?  Could be, but deeper than that, I believe.  In a competitive world, conceding is losing.  We make such poor distinctions between giving in and giving up.  And do the distinctions really matter all that much?  Maybe they do.  Giving up has the quality of defeat, of subordination -- literally ordering myself below.  Giving in has the quality of surrender, but paradoxically not necessarily being defeated.  There is a certain honorableness, an authentic humility, when we give in to a power, to a reality, greater than ourselves. 

Indulge has the connotation of softness, or wimping out.  This is especially true when directed at myself.  I seem to have no problem asking in many subtle ways for other people to indulge me - for being late, for not being organized, for being overextended.  It seems OK to ask it of others, but is it more difficult to grant such indulgences to others?  Often I think it is.  Where does giving in meet giving up?  Am I at my core a self-indulgent person, and I am somehow ashamed of that fact?  In another moment this feeling, this belief, this question, may pass… and that may very well be another well-disguised, self-indulgent moment.

After a rather long search I believe I came across the opposite of indulgence -- rigor.  There is a hardness, and unbending quality to rigor that counterpoints indulgence well.  When I think of rigor I see the rigging for the trapeze in a circus tent.  The tautness that speaks of care, attention to detail, and being unforgiving with anything less than perfection.  There is no forgiveness in such rigor, no indulgences granted.  And the performers seem to mirror this rigor.

Indulgence without rigor leads to a dangerously suffocating softness.  Such an imbalance leads to a kind of unhealthy loss of self, a handing over of the self to the indulgent behavior.  Indulgence without rigor has a drowning quality to it - as if I were drowning in my own permissiveness, in my own inactivity, in my own reluctance to take a stand, my own reluctance to move into action. 

Rigor without indulgence, on the other hand, leads to a severity, a stringency, that is equally dangerous.  Rigor without indulgence becomes an external skeleton that has a shell-like quality to it.  Clams and oysters are images of rigor without indulgence.  They have a hard shell with no internal structure to support the interior life -- all tissue and no bones.  Maybe that's the danger of such relentless rigor.  Camouflaged self-indulgence that appears rigorous to the outside, but that really leads to a sort of oyster-like existence, a life with no backbone. 

There are, however, other definitions, other qualities, associated with this word indulgence -- qualities like tenderness and forbearance and kindness.  Forbearance is particularly important here.  The capacity to show tolerance and restraint, to know deeply the distinction between giving in and giving up in the face of provocation, is the result of a mysterious alchemy that produces the correct mixture of rigor and indulgence.

It is as if our very bones, our struggle to harden ourselves without coarsening our character, is softened and made pliable and more resilient by this quality of indulgence permeating the equally important rigor in our lives.