This year, I will reflect on the four cardinal virtues through daily practice and meditation, intentionally focusing on one per season. After starting the year with prudence, I continued with temperance – or the capacity to contain appetites and moderate sensual pleasures.
Over the week, I reflected on the strength of my appetite of pleasure – and how celebrating it may be the best pathway to temperance.
I started the week with a stomach ache – yet found it strangely difficult simply to reduce portion. Something in me was eager to keep eating more, more, more – as if this would make me heal faster. On Sunday, exhausted, I went to bed at 8pm, with a very light dinner, but all I could think about on the Monday was dinner. We go through much hardship for material satisfaction, yet would not go through the same trouble to prevent much greater personal pain. Is it, perhaps, that we’ve become addicted to pleasure, so much so that its sheer absence is pain. And so, we no longer seek pleasure, we simply try to flee the pain of recovering from our material addictions.
In a workshop I ran on Tuesday, I invited international students to describe their sensorial experience of Melbourne: what are the smells, tastes, sounds, sights and sensations that they’ve enjoyed most in Australia. One of them, a sweet young man from Shenzhen with a beautiful smile, told me, “I can’t do this exercise, I don’t feel anything, I simply stay in my room, and do nothing, feel nothing, or I just go out and buy something.” This absence of any feeling is not temperance, I thought – but it could be the very opposite.
I finished a major project in the middle of the week. On Wednesday, to celebrate, I headed to the supermarket and decided to grab ‘anything I liked’ for lunch. I headed home with beetroot burgers, vegan sausages and unsweetened almond milk. This was not self-restraint though, but genuinely what I felt would give me most enjoyment, not simply the passing caress of pleasure, but a deep, wholistic sense of good.
Thursday was the first day for six-weeks where I didn’t have to think of a major project. I had an acupuncture session scheduled, and focused on rebalancing. All through the day, I allowed myself to do whatever I felt like. I vaguely considered movies, porn, food orgy. Instead, I resumed work on projects I had set aside from various terraces in quiet South Melbourne, enjoying a mild late autumn afternoon. As evening came, I stood on the street and considered my options: what would bring me the most joy: head home and collapse, go to the cinema and watch Alien, or spend as long as the film would last on a long walk through Albert Park, via St Kilda West, and along the beach. This is what I chose, and thought, as I moved through the fresh air, among the eucalyptus trees, and on the sand, this is a genuine act of temperance: given the freedom, I made a sensual choice most conducive to my own happiness.
Our stomachs are me-making machine: food and drinks continuously nurture the machine that is our body, where transformation processes occur non-stop. Intemperance is ignoring of the delicate balance of these internal processes for the short-lived enjoyment of a passing contact, whether food, drink, caresses or images, on our sensitive membranes. Temperance is finding happiness in the quiet, regular functioning of our body. It is deep sensual connection to the simple pleasures associated with well-ordered internal activity.
Julien Leyre - 忠廉 