ahimsa, commitment and fish (but not Phish)

two years ago today, i broke my strictest, longest running bout of vegetarianism to date. i was in St. Petersburg at the time, on a platonic vacation with the woman i would come to call my yin, and Mardou had told me about Hook's Sushi, which was known all the way across the state for its fantastic hand rolls. i went with my best intentions:

List of Best Intentions

#1) visit this house, where Jack Kerouac was living with his mother at the time of his death in 1969:

photo appropriated from Paul Verizzo

#2) visit the Dali Museum and sit on one of its funky benches:

stuffed weasel is not my own

#3) recuperate my scarred memory of the Tampa Bay area, inflicted three years earlier:

author, and an unremembered canal in Tampa

although, owing to a lack of foresight, my first intention was left unrealized, the latter two were wholly successful and the roadtrip still stands as one of my most memorable. my future yin and i went to the Dali Museum on a Saturday afternoon, and the weekend managed to wipe clear all that had transpired in 2005, rolling back my point of reference a full decade to a mad night of punk rock and smelly feet, sleeping in a park in Clearwater and hiding from the Church of Scientology.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that Saturday night, after the Dali Museum, my resolve crumbled under an unbearable desire for Hook's delicious tri-color roll. i could have withstood the tuna, and i can always pass on salmon, but the inclusion of yellow tail pushed me over the edge. i ate the fish, and on the ride back i received my karmic retribution, when my future yin forced me to listen to Phish for hours on end –

the laws of the cosmos can be a cruel, cruel mistress.

since then my vegetarianism has been something of a moving target, and i've had to come to grips that my practice of dietary ahimsa is riddled by a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. i eat curry when i go out for Thai (inevitably made from fish sauce) and, for that matter, i eat at non-vegetarian restaurants without batting an eye (unavoidable cross-contamination).

as a result, i've taken to calling myself a pescetarian rather than "a vegetarian who sometimes eat fish." my logic is simple: it's better to sound pretentious 100% of the time rather than sound like an asshole every 4-6 months. i like to think of this as the delicate balance between non-violence (ahimsa) and truthfulness (satya), but the fact remains that i may just be (mis)using Sanskrit to justify my own lack of commitment.

i wonder how much we do this sort of thing every day, using one pillar of our belief to alternately buttress and undercut the others. and, in doing so, can it be said that we really practice either?

i need only think back to yesterday, when i discussed the hazards of our society's unbridled consumption with a couple of friends in the air-conditioned, iced coffee comfort of The Devil's Watering Hole.

how do we reconcile these inconsistencies in our being?

my own solution, thus far, is found in something Mardou once told me about the four essential "C's" of any relationship: Commitment, Consistency, Communication, and Congruency (which she memorably explained as "when i feel sad, my face looks sad"). in other words, given that i've made this commitment to non-violence, how do i account for the inconsistency of my practice?

for me the answer is this, communicating my lack of congruence, acknowledging the ways i fall short of the person i want to be, and doing my best not to delude myself any more than necessary...

thank you for your participation in this experiment.