Several times today I found myself wondering what I would write about tonight [Tuesday] ... if indeed I could maintain the self-discipline to write something. Maybe I would just talk about my day. Maybe I would troll through my old notebooks looking for another alarming story. Maybe I would take the advice I quoted in yesterday evening's post and use one of those topics ... an element of my autobiography, say (as if you haven't already heard way too much of that), or a word I don't know (not too many of those, comparatively speaking).
But at this point the only thing on my mind – besides that it's late, I'm tired, and I'm really enjoying my third drink of the evening – is a conversation I had in the parking lot after attending sangha this evening. This is the sangha (meditation group) that I go to every Tuesday, the one that meets in the Unitarian church and that Debbie founded years ago. I should probably refer to it as the UU (Unitarian Universalist) Sangha, when I need to give it a name. Anyway, on the way out to the parking lot this evening I was making polite chit-chat with an Asian woman who is a member of the sangha. She's a grandmother and still speaks with a thick accent; while I gather she has been in this country for many years, I gather also that she wasn't born here.
Anyway, we were talking about her car, and how something is wrong with her catalytic converter that is going to cost her a lot of money to fix. And then suddenly I found myself listening to a long and intense speech about all the things that are going wrong in her life these days. She doesn't like living here because she can't find a place she can afford, and besides everything is too spread out. When she lived in San Francisco, things were a lot more compact, or at any rate she could get anywhere she needed to go quickly and by public transportation. Here, not so much. Also things are too expensive here: in San Francisco she could dine out cheaply, but here she has to pay more for lower quality food and can't find decent dim sum anywhere. (Wait, ... what? Things cost less in San Francisco? Did I hear that right?) Also, ... oh hell, the list went on and on. I don't remember it all. Some of it I could sympathize with. But at other times I felt like saying, "Yes, and your point would be ...?" Sure, this and that facet of living in this town are imperfect, but that's just how it is. Not much anybody can do about it.
She laughed at herself that this was a very un-Buddhist attitude she was showing, because we're always hearing the advice (during dharma study) to let things be what they are and not to cling to our desires for them to be something else. She's right, of course, but I figured it would be in bad taste to say so. Instead I asked why she ever left San Francisco. She told me it's because her son lives here, and so this way she can be closer to her son and see him regularly. But then she added, a little wistfully, that of course he has his own life and isn't free to see her all that often. So why doesn't she give up trying to live near her son, and move back to a city she likes better? No, she can't do that because in the time she's been gone San Francisco has become too expensive. (Aha, so in fact there are other reasons for staying here besides being close to her son ... viz., that this is what she can afford.)
After a while she wound down, and I was able to disconnect politely and drive home. But I found myself thinking, God I hope I never become like that as I get older. Of course there is something pharasiacal about saying "I'm glad I'm not like that poor beggar" and stopping there. Also, I really did find a measure of compassion for her in the fact that she is in a situation she has no idea how to adapt to. All the same, by about the third time that she said she finds it really hard to hold onto her identity these days – when she doesn't live in an Asian community and can't do any of the fun things she used to do – I found myself thinking, Wow, you're right, that really is an un-Buddhist thing to say. Surely the Buddhist teaching would be that there is no such thing as your identity in the first place, that in fact you yourself as an independent entity don't really exist at all (strictly speaking), that what claims to be your independent self is just a temporary ripple on the surface of Consciousness like the splash when you throw a rock into the waves at the beach – a momentary configuration that will dissolve soon enough (since we all die) and reconfigure into something else. If you believe in reincarnation then the argument is that you'll be reborn; but even if you don't, the molecules of your body will disperse into the world and become part of something else. Great Caesar may be plugging a bung hole, for all we know.
[Somewhere in the middle of the preceding paragraph I stopped typing Tuesday night. Tiredness from the day and my third glass of wine collaborated to send me crashing into bed. I'm writing the rest of this over breakfast Wednesday morning, with the result that I'm going to be late to work. (sigh)]
Of course this is all fine as intellectual theory, or if you are committed to being a doctrinaire Buddhist. I'm certainly not the latter – I enjoy the practice of meditation and I find the philosophy very consistent with directions my mind had already started walking down years ago, but I'm hardly a doctrinaire anything. Considering how often I look at myself and just shake my head, I'm probably not even a doctrinarire Hosea-ist, whatever that might be. So why do I care about this teaching of impermanence? Why was I using it to justify my mentally criticizing or even judging this poor woman (also a pretty un-Buddhist thing to do!), even while I was nodding sympathetically on the outside and trying to say helpful things about the really unfortunate pickle she feels herself in? Is it just that I've gotten allergic to hearing people complain (except myself, of course), and any excuse is good enough for dismissing somebody else's suffering?
Anything's possible, but I hope not. More exactly, I'm singularly aware these days of just how impermanent this or that element of our identities can be. Two years ago my identity had a lot to do with being a husband and father and homeowner; now, not so much. What's more, there's something valuable in the ability to be happy regardless what is going on. Even when things were truly miserable with Wife, there was a level on which I would have said I was happy. It wasn't the whole story, by a long shot; but it wasn't just self-delusion or happy-talk, either. It was more like ... ummm ... gosh, now that I try to put it into words I'm not quite sure how to do so without sounding glib or simplistic and it wasn't really any of those things either. But let me say this. There were times in the past when depression would get hold of me and I would wish I had never been born. In the last decade or two, that never really happened. There were times of anguish, times of hopelessness. There were times I was furious at God or Providence or my own damned stupidity for landing me in what seemed an impossible situation. There were times that I stared vacantly straight ahead, with no more idea what I was going to do next or how I was going to face tomorrow than I had of how to fly to the moon. And yet, with all that – if you had asked me "Do you want to kill yourself?" there were only a small handful of moments (that left almost as soon as they had arrived) when I would have said Yes. My considered opinion was always No. If you had asked me the great George Bailey question from "It's a Wonderful Life" – would it have been bettter if I had never been born? – the answer would have been No. And indeed I took a lot of comfort from George Bailey's exultant exclamation near the end of that movie, "I'm alive! Yippee! Hooray! I'm going to jail!" I looked at George Bailey in the movie and conceded that yes, it was better for him to be alive even at the cost of being sent unjustly to jail. Then I turned around to look at my own predicament and conceded that if he could be happy – and rightly so – even while being sent unjustly to jail, then I could be happy in my circumstances too. If asked whether I would be willing to live my life over I could have honestly said, with Friedrich Nietzsche, that Yes I would be willing even if every single thing worked out the same way as it did before. I don't think much of the Doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same as a philosophical doctrine; but as a moral aspiration (I mean, the aspiration to love the world so much that you can will the eternal return of your life, even if large parts of that life turn out horrifying, miserable, or just deeply regrettable) ... it's a good one.
I have no idea how to explain this to anybody else without sounding smug and self-satisfied and preachy. I certainly won't try to explain it to my friend from sangha. But I wish I could, because truly it might help her feel better.
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