“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” Buddha
I am sitting here, with nothing much on my mind and some time to kill. While I have nothing compelling to write, it seems to be what I do when I’ve got some empty time. I get confused about whether I am doing it for myself or for you. At this moment, it seems clear to me that I just can’t help myself, which makes it a selfish undertaking. In a way, it makes sense, because everything we do starts from within. All our actions and reactions are internally motivated before coming to life.
My birthday is coming up pretty soon, making me a Gemini and very old. Supposedly, we have an ongoing dialogue with ourselves, which predisposes us towards writing. I know it feels like I am talking to the page, which would be that other half of myself. Thank God, the page gets in between me and schizophrenia. All our minds are like these wandering thoughts, rooted in quicksand and swallowed whole between breaths.
Doing what I do, allows me to run after these thoughts, before they evaporate, swallowed by the next one. Most of the time, I have an idea of what I want to set down on paper, before I get started. It is like being gifted an empty box and I am allowed to filled it in any way I see fit.
When I think about you, reading whatever I have written, I hope it makes the voices of your internal dialogue just a little louder. Listen, we all talk to ourselves without moving our lips. Somebody like me seems to feel the need to record mine, doing so for both of us. The moment we externalize anything, we have involved the other and our intention matters.
The first of the Four Vows in Buddhism goes something like. “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow so save them.” One of the many things I love about this practice is that it is never about arriving, only striving. The effort itself is self-fulfilling. This applies to the above quote as well. I could easily look at my writing as a waste of time when it comes to trying to make a difference. Who gives a shit what I think? What difference will it make anyway?
The world I want is not the one we have and that’s an understatement if ever there was one. Now, what the hell is the point of my writing what I do, considering it is only read by a handful? Nothing will ever come of it. There are two ways to look at this. The pragmatic view would support the idea that it’s a waste of time. The Buddha would completely disagree. He believed in something called dependent co-arising. Walking down a street in Brooklyn, you could feel a very subtle draft from a butterfly taking flight in Tasmania.
I write about so many things, because I believe in them, not in some calculated way to make a difference. The way things are is not the way I am and it is that simple. I am trying very hard to not allow the weight of the world to keep me from flying. All too often, the first thing we do is look outside ourselves. In the absence of an internal anchor, we are taken by the current, vulnerable to being crushed by the rocks of hopelessness and despair.
When I was a kid and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was too young to do the math. The future was like an ill defined concept, nothing more than a word. The consequences of my actions didn’t extend beyond a day or two. I am not sure when I actually got scared about being stuck. I remember mowing the lawn of my house in the suburbs. It was a home I couldn’t afford, in a marriage that was crushing me, feeling like an imposter, a victim of my choices. I was working in the broadcast advertising business, which initially felt very cool, before it started choking my spirit. Tomorrow started feeling like the rest of my life. The palpability of my remaining time started crushing me.
In the midst of the above debacle, it felt like I was dying, without experiencing truly living. It was a painful time, forcing me to make very hard choices in order to save my life. I thought therapy was for crazy people, but I needed to try and figure out what happened to my life, which precipitated around ten years of paid for introspection. Somewhere in there, I came across the Buddha and we became fast friends. So much of what he said made sense to me, often thinking, “Hey, wait that was my idea!”
I had been living in a prison of my own construction and it had begun to feel like a life sentence, dying each day. Looking back after all these years, I have no idea where the courage to change came from. Therapy allowed me explore my history, creating an internal language I had never spoken before. My novice exposure to Buddhism began giving me an understanding of how fragile this life is, filled with contradictions, precious beyond valuation.
Sparing us both the details, I began living my life as if it is a journey, demanding my investment in it. No, it didn’t mean I miraculously became a perfect human being, whatever the hell that means anyway. I am not really sure what role age played in all this. At some point, when you look at the hourglass, it slowly begins resembling a pear, the sand from before, becoming the sand of after. It is so much easier to ignore it, a choice many of us make.
Generally, our minds are rather undisciplined, busy from one minute to the next. When you first begin life’s marathon, the idea of losing is nowhere to be found. Everything begins to slow down as the race continues and ultimately, the last thing you want to see is the finish line. Having no idea at the time, the Buddha became my coach. Slowly, he changed my mental pace, moving my focus from my feet to the view, front and back. Winning and losing were no longer the vocabulary, because the race morphed into a journey for me.
The idea of the journey started becoming much more inclusive, not simply about my own. Did you know that 1% of our body cells are replaced every day? Change is truly the only constant in our lives. The idea of an enduring self is a lovely myth. The grand name given it by the Buddha is impermanence and denying it is the cause of our suffering. Dovetailing with this kind of awareness is the whole idea of our interconnectedness with all that has come before us and all that will follow. It is the butterfly business on a very grand scale, one that is timeless, without beginning or end.
I have no ulterior motive in my storytelling to you. Well, that’s not exactly true. You make a difference by being the difference and the odds don’t matter. You don’t win or lose, because life is not a race, it is a journey and we are all butterflies.
LISTEN TO IT HERE:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1292459/episodes/17172501-striving-never-arriving