Hold On Loosely

Hold on loosely

Don’t let go

If you cling too tightly

You’re gonna lose control -38 Special

I love this song. If you’re ever wondering about the philosophy of Taoism, just recall these lyrics – might as well be the Taoist Rock Anthem. Sure, the song is about relationships – romantic ones – but Taoism is about relationships, too – our relationships to nature, to each other, to ourselves, and to the way things are. Instead of constructing our identities as individual billiard balls knocking against others, Taoism rightly, I believe, offers a more nature-oriented, realistic picture of a person as consisting of a meshed web of relationships, a paradigm that meets up nicely with similar anti-Cartesian (dualistic, mechanistic, oppositional) ideas developed out of quantum mechanics theory and remembered from Native American worldviews.

Yes, that was a mouthful. Which is why I happen to be so appreciative of this song – it so simply touts an idea that an academic-prone philosopher-wanna be like myself can so easily and eagerly turn into a complicated spaghetti-tangled mess, getting high off eating up the pasta-carbs of Deep Thoughts. Which is kind of antithetical to Taoism’s simple style.

For instance, my girlfriend asked me the other day how Taoism differs from Buddhism, and these lyrics have a possible answer. I wouldn’t say Taoism and Buddhism are starkly different or at all opposing, more that they strive for the same things and work within the same universe but with a slightly differing emphasis. So, while Buddhism – and I’m being overly reductive here, I know – emphasizes letting go of desire, for instance, Taoism is more about holding on, but loosely.

Life is a Highway…
If you are a rider on a horse, Buddhism would suggest that you let go of the reins and get off the horse and go meditate, give up trying to get anywhere, the effort of expending your energy toward a goal is pointless, you can’t reach enlightenment by riding your horse.

Taoism, on the other hand, would say that you should keep riding the horse and holding on the reins, but you should try to ride with the horse, not on the horse, directing and guiding, not forcefully, but in a flow that matches the pace and rhythm of the horse’s gait as well as your own heartbeat, within the context of the landscape around you. Taoism would say, sure, ride the horse, but do so knowing that it is what it is, don’t make it more than it is. The Buddhists are right, you’re not going to escape death or reach eternity, but hey, you’re alive, might as well have a good time riding the horse… (And yes, so many ancient Chinese poets were also winos…)

And that’s what I like about Taoism vs. other religions. It embraces the philosophical stance of realizing that we as individuals are not at the center of the universe and that clinging to materialistic desires is futile; at the same time – and that’s the key, at the same time - both/and - Taoism encourages the acceptance of reality as it is, with all its transience, pain, and joy.

For many Christians and Buddhists, this life on Earth is something to grit your teeth through till you get on the elevator of salvation or zapped in the microwave of enlightenment. Taoists aren’t looking to the next life or the erasing of life; they look to this life with the ease of someone who has accepted that she belongs here, that this is home.

Do You Realize?
All is sacred; all is mundane. We are made of starlight; we are made of mud. When we can hold both views of reality – seemingly opposing views – in our heads at the same time, when we can take the importance of things lightly, while at the same time understanding everything as valued and significant, then we can fully be alive, with all of our senses, with all of our hearts. This is Taoist enlightenment.

Keep on Moving
When you try to hold onto something, squeeze it to fix it in place, keep it from changing – an idea, a relationship, a person, a situation, a feeling – you kill it. Which is why the Taoist meditation is Tai Chi or Qi Gong – a moving through the world, not sitting it out. It is also why the yin-yang symbol intends to show fluidity of opposites merging into one another. They are not static categories, mutually exclusive pieces, but part of each other, in constant motion.

Finally

a) If you can correctly identify the song titles in my headings, you win a free yin-yang symbol drawn on your arm with a Sharpie.

b) Later I will actually quote the Tao te Ching, discuss the Vinegar Tasters, and rant about Niels Bohr. So watch out.

c) I’m truly not trying to bash the Buddhists.

Waking Up From History

Right here, right now

There is no other place I’d rather be

Watching the world wake up from history – Jesus Jones

 

For all the terrible wreckage our world may seem at times, whether it’s our deep identity crisis as a species as we brutalize our fellow creatures and world or our cultural vacancies and familial breakdowns as our ideologies shift and sputter and breakdown in the middle of our lives, one thing heartens and excites me about this time of being alive. I feel like a lot of people are really asking the right questions, and that, in some ways, the hairy singers in Hair were right – this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Sure, it’s not an instant revolution of flower-sniffing, but there’s a general turning over of the consciousness topsoil.

I just finished Run by Ann Patchett. The whole novel is a great read – she manages to tell a good, emotionally engaging story without jabbing at you to make you cry – but there’s this really well-done passage that serves as evidence of how the general ideas about things are shifting, little by little.

The character of the priest describes his changing vision of the afterlife:

… he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live… In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed … that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone…. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy… this was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given.

Completely set within the context of a Catholic priest’s theology comes this vision of the sacredness of life that is usually find in Eastern thought, and it rings true. I love that.

And I feel like I find a lot of novels, music, art, thinkers, coming to this same conclusion. Whether or not they feel a conviction about next steps after death, people are embracing the present more and more.

It’s an exciting turn of events. If we can spread the notion of opening our eyes to each moment’s gifts, whatever they offer, a lot of changes will happen. To feel that you are witnessing, indeed, surrounded by God, changes how you treat other people, other creatures, yourself. In some ways, believing starts the seeing. As the passage concludes:

It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.

 

Bugs and Meditation

Dear Strange Gnats that Fly Together Over the White Line on the Riverview Trail and Get in My Eyes,
The other day I was running and one or two of you – who can tell, you’re so small and swarmy – ran into (or I ran into you) my contact lens, causing my eye to smart and spill with tears. I had to stop running, remove the contact.

I’m pretty blind. So when I took out the one contact, the trees around me smeared into Impressionistic-type drools of color. I felt a bit dizzy. I kept walking , but slowly, and the chirping, heavy-scented throng of leaves on either side of me pushed in closer, it seemed, and I felt utterly enveloped.

And alone. And alive.

It was kind of like meditation, or sleeping – senses distorted – colors turned up to a scream -I could feel my whole self trembling and present, and I could almost, it felt, utterly dissolve right there and never reappear.

So, Strange Flying Creatures Hovering Over the White Line,

Thank you.

You disrupted my run, you made me slow down, you blinded my eye, you gave me a moment of purity, a purity of a moment,

oh you may not be very attractive or sweet but your annoyance oh, what a gift it gave me.

Disaster Plan

We were at Northeast Park, crossing the wooden bridge over the little creek, when we spotted a deer. It let us gawk for a while, then moved on. We continued up the trail. My daughter running up ahead disappeared behind a bush – we heard some running, bushes cracking – then a scream.

The deer had run into my daughter – and luckily, only left a hoofprint bruise on her shoulder, hardly harming her.

The whole incident, as they do, only took a few seconds, and there was no way to prevent it, other than to have my kid roped to my body at all times.

Freak accidents – I particularly detest them. We work so hard to avoid disaster – car seats, arch supports, vitamins, looking both ways when we cross the road. A woman blithely pushes her child in a stroller down a sidewalk, and a car spins out of control and crashes into them. A snake bites a woman in her garden and she doesn’t reach her phone to call for help in time. A boy gulps too much water at the pool and dies several hours later at home on his bed of drowning. Even living in an impenetrable bubble or cement cocoon I have a feeling would be susceptible to an earthquake, a volcano, a knawed cord cutting off the oxygen tank…

There’s part of me that still thinks I can outwit fate. If I can interpret the signs, see what’s coming around the corner, I can jump out of harm’s way in time… dodge the bullet…

There’s part of me that gives a little “Whew!” when I hear about someone else’s disaster – “Wasn’t me!”- and subconsciously I file away on my list of Dangerous Activities whatever it was – like “Don’t walk child in stroller on sidewalk between 5 and 5:15 on Wednesdays” and “Don’t let child swallow water while living in Florida” – even though I logically know that these mishaps are not lessons, but accidents. True accidents don’t teach us safety lessons. They have no point or purpose. All we can learn from them is that we are all, at all times, susceptible and endangered. Life ends in death, and we have little control over determining the hows and whens of the termination.

After my father died, this reality felt to me like a hungry dog, invisibly breathing down my neck, about to snap its jaws on me and my loved ones at any moment. I lived in constant fear. I had no warnings my dad would die. I had dinner with him, and he went to bed and died. It was the first time I had seen him in a year and a half. It was the last time I saw him ever.

It’s only years later that I can understand that giving up the need to prevent disaster is the only way to live fearlessly. All the gurus find this freedom and peace – giving up the desire to control life and avoid pain. But it’s not something you read about in a self-help book and gulp down in one swallow. Finding a way to let go of the illusion that you can grab onto the carpet so it’s not pulled out from under you is one of the hardest things a person can do. That carpet is a security blanket. That carpet is the ground on which many of us walk. Even when you know that illusion is false, it can feel good to believe in it.

I know for myself that when it comes to grief and loss, I experience some anger. It feels like a joke, a setup – here’s this gorgeous world, here’s these lovely people, here’s a beloved, here’s a child – now, guess what? It’s all temporary. It all disappears. One by one it goes away. Then you go away.

The rabbit disappears and doesn’t show up again. Great trick. Some people have stories about how the rabbit gets resurrected, and then they argue about whether it really happened or not (and then they invent Easter).

And then there’s the argument that if everything were eternal, nothing would have any meaning. To which I initially replied, Bullcrap. (I think the first time I read this was in Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, a fun novel that deals with eternity and a wierd Irish guy.)

But I’ve started to discover that relationships and lives and other things don’t derive their meaning from their longevity – from lasting. Nothing lasts; to define worth by time amounts seems an odd valuation system.

And when I think of a child’s life, it is not worth less if it ends sooner rather than later. Or a father’s. Or that of a marriage. Or a business venture. Or the time of owning a house. The import of a love, a moment, an experience, may be affected by the time it spans – but that is not the sole factor.

When I spend all of my mental and emotional energy focusing on ’saving’ myself, my children, my relationships from ending, I abandon the actual living of life, the spending of the time together. And then – what am I saving?

The only way I have been able to comfort myself about the inevitability of loss is to let go of it, and drink in what exists now.

I still sometimes think I won’t be able to stand it, to take it, to make it through. I still miss my father, terribly, and feel robbed of his presence in my life. I still want never to have to say goodbye to anyone. I don’t like it.

I’ll never forget this one night when I was 17 years old. My first love called me long distance and broke up with me. I was inconsolably weeping. The rest of the house was asleep, but my father, night owl that he was, was up. He gave me a hug and said, “It’s not the end of the world.”

I was furious. Who cared about the end of the world? I didn’t – it was the end of my heart.

Poor Dad. Weeping adolescent. What do you say? And when he died, I wanted so badly to tell him – Yes dad, not the end of the whole world, but you dying is definitely the end of mine.

Seventeen years later, I want to tell him – Dad, I know what you mean. Things come and go, including you and I. It just takes so long, Dad, to get used to it – life being so cruel and beautiful at the same time.

No, no way to stop it. We can choose to try to – or choose to accept it. Choose to dive into life and accept that we will die, over and over again.

I scribble up my disaster plans, my strategies for escape, and then rip them up again, over and over.

I’m not getting out of it alive.

The Secret Imagination: Part II

In the recent edition of Yoga Journal, Sally Kempton writes:

Imagination – our ability to create images not available to the sensory system – is arguably our greatest faculty for evolving human consciousness. In order to transform ourselves and our world, we need to be able to leap out of the familiar and into the unknown. … the imagination can help us begin to replace our internal patterns, especially the ones that keep us limited and stuck. If we can reimagine our sense of who we are, we can change our experience of life. If you can imagine yourself, say, free of suffering, you’ve taken the first step toward that freedom.

Later in the article she connects our internal imagination with external acts, pointing out that:

If you’re spending time during your day imagining yourself as filled with compassion, it doesn’t take you long to notice that you speak to people differently and even treat yourself with much more subtlety and kindness.

So yesterday, for “shits and giggles” as a favorite person used to say – (I won’t go into the images that comes into my head when I hear that phrase – don’t want to sully your imagine and bring about the wrong kind of transformation!) – I “tried” “The Secret.” Caveat – I have avoided the book and movie or any other description of this completely – I only followed the vague idea I heard from my therapist – who was also skeptical, but did wonder what would happen if I tried it.

Item #567 you can do when you don’t have a job: Experiment with New Agey psycho- hijinks (next week, Tarot cards and a colonic cleansing).

I performed a kind of meditative visualization exercise and wrote down five things I wanted to happen that day. They were:

1. To be told “I love you” by a certain someone

2. For someone to offer a job or job interview

3. For sandalwood perfume oil to reappear in my life

4. To have a stranger flirt with me (reassure my ego!)

5. For someone from my past to warmly contact me and inquire as to how I am doing

The Results

Now, here’s the funny thing. Basically, all of these items “came true” or came to fruition – but before you get excited about the possibility of a magic recipe, let’s recall the insights from Kempton, summarized above – the act of the imagination in the mind can have force and expression in the body, transferring from the world of ideas to the world of actuality a wish, a possibility, a desire.

Example: The basketball player envisions the perfect slam dunk before the game, and her chances of actually performing that slam dunk “in real life” go up immensely.

So here’s basically how it went down.

1. I arranged coffee with the certain someone and though I had no expectations, the love was indeed reciprocated.

2. From the networking I’ve been doing through Facebook, a person I hardly know connected me to others I don’t know, and it looks like at least one of them will need me for work.

3. I went online and ordered the sandalwood.

4. I went out to a social gathering; someone flirted with me.

5. I spent a large part of the day beefing up my Linked In profile by writing recommendations for past colleagues, and indeed, someone from my past did warmly email me, as a result.

So, we’re not talking about mystical alchemy here. We’re talking about how writing down the things I wanted from the day in a positive manner – as in, I wasn’t thinking “here’s my goals to accomplish,” which would have pressured me with onerous tasks, but rather “here’s what I want, deep down inside, but who knows” – provoked me to take steps that made the things I desired occur. I wasn’t really focused on the outcomes I had listed. I just acted out of desire – to connect, to be near a loved one, to smell better.

This isn’t magic or rocket science. It’s kind of the principle of the book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow – ridiculous, but really when you engage in what you love and desire, when you – yes, here I go again! Joseph Campbell alert! – follow that stinkin’ bliss, but not for the accomplishment or the reward but for the love of the thing in itself – then you truly enter into the kind of fruitful relationship with yourself and your work/art/relationships that allows you to be fully present and ultimately fully satisfied.

One of those paradoxical laws that is so simple and hard, it must be true.

So, no: I’m not a “The Secret” convert. But this experiment did underscore for me

• the importance of giving so that you can receive – without expectations;
• doing what you love out of love;
• and sometimes, when you want something – well, you can go online and order it.

Notes on Desire

I have to address desire – it gets such a bad rap with religion – it causes suffering, etc. But you have to add a dash of Rumi to your Buddha, I believe, to round out your understanding of desire in the context of spiritual awareness:

Let yourself be silently drawn

by the stronger pull of what you really love.

Rumi

For Rumi, love and desire pull us to the Love with a capital L – the rapture of union with the All. When we are following our heart’s arrow of true desire, our path, when we are doing the things we love to do and loving the people we love and embracing the identity that feels right – when we are honoring our deepest self – then we are, simultaneously, honoring and celebrating the whole, the larger truths.

True love, I have found, requires sacrifice of the selfish, ego-driven love.

True faith requires the sacrifice of the illusion of control.

This is not easy stuff to maintain, master. But it is getting to the heart of where the imagination and reality meet. Through our desire we create a vision of true love and faith that changes us and leads us into the experience and presence of truth.

Desire withers the heart.

The Master observes the world

but trusts his inner vision.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is as open as the sky. [Tao te Ching, 12]

I guess I think that perhaps desire leads to delight or suffering depending upon its root and its object.

If we want only for the happiness of our small egos, no matter the suffering of others, no matter the well-being of the world, then that is when we are full of the desire that ruins us, for we are falsely seeing our Self as separate from the world, and we are placing its importance above that of others. If we desire to control, to go against things as they are, we are setting ourselves up to battle the whole of which we are apart, and we will suffer.

But if our desire includes the happiness and well-being of the world, includes caring for the suffering of others as well as our own, if our sense of compassion and love places our individual selves within the proper context of the whole, then our desire is divinely inspired.

A good example is romantic love. The ego-driven desire wants the beloved to fill the self, to love the self, to complete and satisfy the needs and wants of the self. The self likes the way the beloved’s attention feels.

But true love views the beloved for who he or she is, and desires that person’s happiness, whatever the cost to the self.

See the world as your self.

Have faith in the way things are.

Love the world as your self;

then you can care for all things. [Tao te Ching, 13]

If we love our neighbors as ourselves, then we can find the right balance. If we lose a lover, but he or she is happy, we can accept the reality of the loss and our sadness – but we can also delight in his or her happiness. This happiness can remove the sting of loss and is the way to true peace.

The Secret Imagination: Part I

So, it’s probably no secret that I’m not a fan of The Secret. I never did think Jesus was giving Christians parking spaces, and not because I didn’t think he couldn’t be bothered, but because I don’t think prayer is like a vending machine – you don’t put in the right amount to get the candy you requested. Prayer is more like entering a connection, a holy space. You’re not ordering from a menu.

And the thing about getting prayers answered, or wishes answered, or your intentions fulfilled is that, whether sponsored by an intelligent deity or not, the universe doesn’t work in one-to-one correspondence with our desires.

If Einstein had prayed never to make a mistake during his experiments, he never would have hit upon the revelations that rocked our world.

And if I got everything I ever wanted, would I really get everything I ever wanted?

I personally don’t believe that things happen for a reason, but I do know that things happen or don’t happen, and what matters isn’t that what we wanted to happen didn’t or vice versa but that we learn from the happenings, learn to adapt, adjust, and move.

If God doesn’t grant the parking space we wanted, we might blame ourselves (I didn’t pray hard enough! Not enough faith!) or we might blame God (He just doesn’t care!) or we could also think, Maybe I’m supposed to be parked five miles from the shopping mall entrance. Or Wow, this gives me an opportunity to take a walk and watch the clouds, or breathe, or count cool license plates.

The problem with Prayer by Mail Order and The Secret stuff is that it’s all basically surface-level demands that is essentially self-centered, and not in the good kind of centered in the self way, either.

I prefer to think in the Taoist sense of letting go of both hope and fear and staying grounded in the reality of the present. What is the present presenting to me? And how will I act and respond? It’s much more practical and useful to take the parking space that comes and use it to your advantage than it is to try to psychically force energy or a god to get the parking space you want.

All of that said, I do believe in the power of prayer and of the imagination. But I’ll save that for next time. Stay tuned!

Death Will Ease Your Suffering (no, really, it will!)

I’ve been experiencing a great deal of grief, sadness, and loss lately, and sometimes, the loneliness feels intense.

It was pointed out to me that I seem to want others to fix it for me, comfort me, soothe my misery.

And yes, I have to say that as I walking today, exposing myself to sun, hoping to walk out the sadness, I realized that I do so want someone – my estranged mother, my dead father, my friends, anyone – to wrap themselves around me and tell me I am loved, and it will be okay.

Of course, the desire is understandable. But it is desire, and you know what that does to you, of course. And I’m trying to learn to comfort myself.

It’s not so easy.

I wandered into a cemetery – I was ambling, walking down dead end streets, not exactly lost but I couldn’t tell you where I was, exactly – one of those patches of grass and stone that feel like some kind of abandoned city with no historical texts to tell you what happened. Names and dates, but no storyline. Just a lot of silence.

My heart felt swollen, tender, like an injured foot.

I thought about dying (go figure).

And then it dawned on me, there among the ruins, that when I die, I won’t have these awful feelings anymore.

Oddly, like nothing else, the thought calmed me.

Not because I want to die – truly not looking forward to it, kind of angry about it, but that’s a whole other story – but because this suffering is indeed going to end, and life, even with this intensely acute suffering, is much preferable to feeling nothing at all.

This isn’t some earth-shattering revelation – but I truly felt it, not just as an abstract consideration, but as a solid reality.

the goddess Kali

Hope, you know, hasn’t been really possible. I can’t hope that I’ll ever have a family again, with love and comfort; even if I get it, it will go away again. Everything dies, changes. So hope has not been a comfort.

As Pema Chodron says:

If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be
exterminated, then we can have  the courage to relax with the
groundlessness of our situation.  This is the first step on the path.

My problem has been that I’ve been getting lost in the groundlessness, sinking in the quicksands of my despair.

But death has been a rope out – and lead me to remember Kali. Years ago when I first started reading about Tantra and goddesses, I had a hard time understanding the rituals surrounding worship of the goddess Kali, who is alternately the most fierce and the most loving of deities. Some Tantric practices involve digging up corpses; Kali is often portrayed having sex with the body of her dead husband, Shiva.

There’s this odd mix of comfort and utter destruction mixed into this figure, and I didn’t quite get it. She’s a mother goddess – but she represents the absolute dissolution of all things?

But I get it now. When we face death, we see life with a precision and clarity that provides the sustenance of reality, truth, — and comfort.

To confront or accept death… is to realize a mode of being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods. To accept one’s mortality is to be able to let go, to be able to sing, dance, and shout. Kali is Mother to her devotees not because she protects them from the way things really are but because she reveals to them their mortality and thus releases them to act fully and freely, releases them from the incredible, binding web of “adult” pretense, practicality, and rationality [from exoticindia]

As I walked home, I smelled the rosemary from someone’s garden, saw the brilliant clouds, tasted sun, hurt but alive, and glad to be so.

Let Go, Let Taoism

I heard a person say the other day a phrase familiar to me from my Christian past: “Let go and Let God.”

Immediately I thought about the Taoist concept of wu-wei, not-doing, which means that you don’t work against the flow, but move with it. You let go of trying to force things – you let the universe do its thing.

It’s not often I feel like Christianity and Taoism share concepts, but when it comes to Christ admonishing his followers not to worry, because God dresses the flowers in the field and feeds the sparrow,  I think Lao-Tze would nod his head. “God” or “Tao,” here, refers to this mysterious and yet totally natural and mundane aliveness – Dylan Thomas’ green life force – that doesn’t die when one of us dies, that doesn’t stop. We can worry or not worry, but the storm will come, the sun will shine, the ozone layer will diminish, babies will be born, people will die. We can have a temper tantrum about it, or we can accept it, and enjoy it while we’re here. We have that choice. When you see yourself as living within the whole, whether you picture that whole as being the hand of a benevolent deity or not, you see yourself, I believe, in the right perspective. Worry becomes irrelevant. Your relationship to the whole matters more than whether you get your way about a small particular or not.

Which reminds me of this paradoxical quote:

What you do is of little significance, but it is very important that you do it.
-M.K. Gandhi

And I will bow to the flow and let this post go right here.

A Website for Happiness: Who knew?

I know there’s all kinds of websites, but this is just ridiculous:

This world needs more happiness. Obviously – even in a cushy society like ours, we have websites like the one above.

The Bad Rap on Happy
Growing up a Christian, finding happiness wasn’t really high on my priority list. Happiness was disdained as something self-serving, self-indulgent, and not quite as grounded or as elite as “joy,” which I remember being defined in my young head as ‘a good feeling even though you are suffering, because you’re suffering for the right reasons.’ Being happy was considered a transitory state – not like deep, abiding joy. Later, when I was studying Buddhism, there seemed to be a similar nose-wrinkle about all things ‘happy.’ Definitely, even as a poetry student, Truth and Beauty and Love landed higher scores than silly old happiness.

And Happy is the dwarf who seems a little too, right?

Even in the broader American culture, there exists bias against happiness. Wives aren’t supposed to be happy, but loyal; men aren’t supposed to be happy, just satisfied; kids aren’t supposed to be happy, but good. And lots of happiness is just stupid, right?

On the other hand, in our youth-worshipping world, we idolize childhood as the time of happiness, and we long to return to it, we’re jealous of it, bitter and resentful that kids get to be happy… to want to be happy gets in the way of enlightenment, stability, security, success, all the things that feed the culture’s image of itself – but not the individual.

Reconsidering
I’ve given happiness a second chance.  But it’s definitely new for me to consider seeking happiness as a worthwhile enterprise. I kind of like it. I’m finding that happiness is not as superficial or selfish as advertised.

Marcus Aurelius agrees: “Happiness is a good god within.” (And hey, if a Roman dude says so…)

If happiness is a goodness – a good thing to have and to desire – the pursuit of! – I feel a kind of gentle leniency enter into my perspectives of others whom I might otherwise judge on the harsh side.

That is, if you evaluate people’s choices based on an external set of rules vs. the level of their internal happiness, you’re often going to dislike their choices.

Lizards
Like, for instance, getting a lizard tail attached permanently to your bottom. I read about this several years ago in Harper’s – there’s at least one, probably more, surgeon whose specialty is giving people butterfly wings and other animal-esque add-ons. It’s tattoos and plastic surgery taken just that one step further…

… I was kind of horrified and disgusted when I first read about this – and disturbed that individuals wouldn’t be satisfied with their own bodies, and worried about the implications for biological ethics.

But really – if lizard-tail guy is happy? If the god within him is delighted with that tail, if his soul is cheerfully singing, then I am happy for him. Truly.

Now, that is, in a way, an easy scenario. Presumably, the lizard tail can be delivered without the expense of any one else’s happiness. That’s where things get tricky. Sometimes you find your ultimate happiness – and someone else has to pay for it. Or so it seems.

The Messy Side of Happy
I’m going to be radical and say that happiness, just like love, is not always distributed fairly. Sometimes it’s messy and expensive.

Often someone profits from another’s misery – often unintentionally, though sometimes knowingly. For instance:

• A gorgeous diamond ring! but workers in South Africa suffered to mine it
• You win the spot on the cheerleading squad! But that other girl who had wanted it so badly lost out to you, and will cry herself to sleep
• You choose  your happiness, which means to go live in another country – causing your parents deep unhappiness that you are so far away

Etc. The relationship between suffering and happiness and the choices we make – ah, that’s a book I’m sure many a philosopher has already written more thoroughly than I could even attempt… it definitely gets messy.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want…
But ultimately I believe that we are each responsible for finding our own happiness. It’s not something else someone can deliver to you or anyone else’s duty to preserve for you.

Elizabeth Lesser writes in her book The Seeker’s Guide that  (I’m paraphrasing): you can get what you want – but you can’t get what you want all the time, or get everything you want.

This rule definitely applies to happiness. In some ways, my early instruction was correct: Happiness can be fleeting. It is never some permanent end-state blacking out all sorrow or grief. You can find some happiness – but you can’t escape all sadness. Both are part of the human experience.

I think I can safely conclude that you’ll be happier if you learn to treat happiness with some respect. So remember:

• When you find it, let yourself have it, fully – honor and relish it
• When others find it, let them enjoy it, without jealousy, bitterness, or judgment
• It’s not always going to be pretty or easy
• It’s never going to last forever (nothing will)

I guess I am probably still biased toward truth and all that. But I think it’s important to give ourselves and others permission to be happy.

I doubt a website can do it for anybody, but you know, if it makes you happy…