On being who I am

It occurred to me earlier this week that there is a principle in Buddhism encouraging us to accept that things are what they are rather than clinging to a fantasy that they could or should be something different.  We are told that clinging, after all, is the source of suffering.  If you really wish that the sky were green, but -- bad luck! -- it's actually blue instead, you're going to spend your whole life disappointed.  But only reconcile yourself to the idea that it's going to be blue most of the time -- grey when cloudy, tinged with orange and gold during sunsets, but normally blue -- and all that disappointment disappears.  It's a principle that you hear about any number of places, and I have long since thought of several other people who really ought to take it to heart.  If only Wife or Father (for instance) could see the wisdom of this principle, think how much easier life would be for everyone around them!

Of course you know what's coming.  What I saw suddenly, earlier this week, is how I could make my own life easier if I were to take this principle seriously.  I asked myself: What would life be like if I were to accept that I am what I am: an overweight, middle-aged professional bureaucrat?  One who likes to read, and who intermittently has interesting things to say, but who isn't any more than that: who isn't secretly a writer, or a philosopher, or a scholar manqué, no matter how much of a star student he was back in school forty years ago?  What would life be like then? 

My immediate answer was that it would be tremendously freeing, a great relief.  Several times recently I have found myself reading what other people -- practising writers -- have to say about the writing life; more and more often I find the descriptions unappealing.  And it has been a cause of some anxiety that I keep telling myself that "one day" I'm going to do the same thing.  I've gotten past the idea that I could make a living by writing; these days my fantasies all include continuing to work and just writing "on the side."  But I've got a full list of books planned out in my head, just waiting for me actually to set pen to paper.

If I could convince myself that I don't have to do that, it would be great.

But it's not easy.  The morning this idea came to me, I was driving to work.  I had gotten no more than two stoplights farther down the road before I found myself imagining that the realization I didn't have to write all this stuff might be so freeing that I'd actually sit down to write it because I wouldn't worry about how it came out.  I'd write it just for fun.  Only it would be great stuff anyway, so of course I'd still end up publishing it after all ... see how that works?  Old habits are hard to break.

But sometimes it just might be worth breaking them.  Food for thought.