Life is Crappy. Be Happy

There is a point, when you are learning a new language, where you have moments experiencing what it would be like to speak it fluently. You may find yourself following a few consecutive sentences without translation, riding the rhythm of meaning in this new discourse, before it falls apart and you find yourself clueless again.

Even before this, however, you have to listen in a way you're not used to hearing. It may sound like the words are similar to words you know, or sounds you know, but it becomes an obstacle to learning if you can't let go of those ready classifications and just hear it as it is.

Start from scratch.

Weeks have now passed since my retreat. I have continued the practice. This little essay attempts to capture some of my thoughts and experiences, from the aftermath, as well as some deep discussions recently with friends and some recent postings from Ayla and Tao I enjoyed and how they intersect with my world at the moment.

Let's start with Zorba the Greek. This is a tale of a young Greek intellectual, Piraeus, with book learning and a philosophical understanding of the world who begins a journey into a deeper exploration of life through a propitious encounter with the irascible old codger named Zorba. Zorba has lived a full life and, as you might imagine, has a very different take on it than Piraeus. At one point Piraeus, overwhelmed by this character's depth, asks him if he'd ever been married. Zorba replies, "of course. I'm just a man. I've been married, had kids, a family, a job, the whole catastrophe!"

Out of context, this might sound like a punch-line. But what Zorba was trying to say to Piraeus was an interesting insight about life, one that is particularly skewed in American culture it seems. That is that life is basically a mixture of the good and the bad. Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin, but happiness or unhappiness is not intrinsic to either.

In its essence, meditation is simply being aware of what is. That's what makes is so hard. And rewarding. It's not some detached state of tranquility where you remove yourself from the world and its concerns. It starts, of course, with just sitting with minimal distractions. Because our minds are so easily caught up in our habitual responses to things, we need this simplification at first. But the goal is to develop this center we can take out into life in order to observe, perhaps for the first time, what's really going on. It gives us, incrementally, a little space between our thoughts and feelings and our reactions to them.

And it does this so we can discover a curious in-sight. Most, if not all of us, spend most of our time suffering. And it's not necessary. But to get to this insight, requires us to stop and really observe. Not think. Because the first stage of this observation is noticing the tremendous barriers of denial we have about it. I think the "flavor" of this denial is uniquely cultural, but the existence seems to be universal.

Please note, this is not a "sad sack" type of tribunal about "life is hard, poor me", it leads to something interesting. The way out of suffering is through it, not around it. Sometimes a bone may need to be broken again to set properly.

When we start exploring our raw experience instead of our thoughts and interpretations, we may notice that we're seldom very happy. When things happen that bring us pleasure, we want to hold onto them, we want to find ways to get more of this in the future, to secure it. We cling. When things happen we don't like, we elaborate it. "What a jerk! How inconsiderate" we fume and rant or we recriminate ourselves, "I should be more forgiving", "this shouldn't bother me!" Most of us live in a low-grade but constant state of anxiety and agitation about all the things that need to be fixed, improved, remedied. We may dip for a few moments, at times, into acceptance of how things actually are, usually only in moments of pleasure, and these are often rapidly overtaken with plans on how to get this more often or how to hold onto it. We may find ourselves comparing our lives to others, with self-satisfaction or dismay. We may posit some future where we anticipate pleasure. When we actually start looking at these moment to moment experiences of our mind, there seems to be a lot of scurrying.

And then we may notice that underlying all of this is a fundamental illusion, one that doesn't really mesh with how things really are. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing stays the same. Certainly not in the external world, much less our moods or sense of self. Yet most of our reactions assume there are constants. Most of our disappointments are discovering time and time again that this is not the case.

So is there a way to live this life "as it is", to experience the full catastrophe, without grasping for pleasures and running away from pain? Without becoming a martyr in our suffering or becoming numb and indifferent? I believe there is, and I think the first step is, as a wise man once said, "To let go of suffering, we have to admit it into consciousness."

To explore this more deeply, and not simply philosophize about it, I can recommend two experiential guides to start a journey:

Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Dancing with Life by Phillip Moffitt

A somewhat related and entertaining talk on the illusion of how we make certain decisions...really fascinating; the implications of not knowing ourselves as well as we think!