Nothing to lose

I had an epiphany of sorts the other day, when I was feeling desperately low. This isn't really making sense to me yet, so I'm going to try and flesh it out a bit here.

I wanted to say something to a loved one, but was afraid of the potential reaction. Then I realized, I have nothing to lose. I've already lost everything at some future point, given the impermanent nature of all things. It could be said that I never "had" anything to begin with. Nothing is mine. I don't own any thing. I don't own any person. Or relationship. Or concept. There's nothing I can hold in my hands and say, "this is mine, now and forevermore."

When I operate under the delusion that I can "have" things, people, relationships, I act in ways that facilitate gaining or keeping them. I act in unnatural ways because I don't want to lose the one I love, lose my source of income, lose some thing I own. I can't act in any sort of pure fashion, because I'm concerned with keeping these things intact. In the process, I become just a collection of these things I keep, and I lose my real self.

When I have nothing to lose, I am perfectly free. I am not concerned at all with grabbing and clutching and holding on. Nothing has a hold on me, either. I am unfettered by possessions, by concepts, by that-which-I-can't-live-without. I can live without any of it. Or not. I don't even own my body. It will die and fade away. I can't make it younger, I can't keep it alive indefinitely, and to cling to it is a kind of madness.

There is no such thing as failure when one has nothing to lose. Failure is losing, and if there is no losing, there is no failure. Therefore it frees one to try anything - absolutely anything at all - because there is no clinging to some idea of "success" or even worthiness. I can't succeed at this blog post, or at my relationship, or at life. I can't lose, either.

to me, this lays to rest the conundrum of emptiness in buddhism. Why try, if nothing matters? Why do anything, if it's all empty and impermanent? Realizing there's nothing to lose, one can say "Why not?" Time is infinite, not limited. Everything that's ever existed, and ever will, exists right now, and it's not going anywhere - just constantly changing form. The leaves that were on the tree yesterday are on the ground today, and will be swept up and bagged tomorrow. No leaf was lost. Nothing went "wrong" in that scenario. If I had picked the leaf, if I had burned the tree, it would produce a different outcome, but still nothing was lost.

There is no point in keeping it all in. There is no point in restricting oneself. Consequences abound, but when acts with compassion, you cannot go wrong. Only when you fear you have something to lose will you go astray, for then you will cling and clutch and grab to avoid losing that thing. You cannot have love and fear in the same breath. Only the truly fearless can truly love.

Doing, not thinking

My life has seriously gotten off track in the past four or five months, and I've come to realize that a large chunk of that is because I spend a lot of time thinking, and not enough time doing. I think about my situation (financial, emotional, relationship). I think about where I got off track. I think about why I got off track. I think about what I should be doing. I think about why I'm not doing what I should be doing (yes, I see the irony in this post). I think about making plans to do what I should be doing. But I actually do very little.

Why I don't keep in touch

Recently I've become horrible at keeping in touch with my friends. I haven't been an every-day-phone-call kind of girl since high school, but lately I've gone months without contacting a few friends. It's weird, because they're interesting people, there's no bad blood between us, and I truly care about them. Yet I find it hard to pick up the phone or shoot off an e-mail. I know it's partly guilt because it's been so long, and I don't know what to say ("sorry, I was abducted by aliens"). It's also because my life has been in something of a rut these last few months, and I don't want to drag anyone else down, nor do I feel I have an abundance of interesting tidbits to offer.

I'm also not the most social person unless I'm prodded. In college, I was forced to interact with people. One day two concerned friends showed up at my dorm room after I'd been MIA in the cafeteria. (Unfortunately, I was in the middle of having phone sex when they started pounding on the door.)

Furthermore, my friends are widely dispersed, so it's difficult to see them or get any two of them in the same place at once. (Actually, only two of them have ever met each other, and they don't get along well.) Here are the locations of my six closest friends. The closest is two hours away. (Sorry Canadians, I was too lazy to find a map with provincial boundaries. Those markers are supposed to be Calgary and Vancouver.)



Anyway, whine whine whine, I need to make some friends nearby, and I need to keep in touch with the diaspora.

Deluding ourselves

A story: A parrot came to stay in the hermitage where a bhikkhu meditated-a very peaceful place with many fruit trees. The bhikkhu tried to teach the parrot, saying to it, "Oh parrot, there is a danger here. A hunter will come and scatter some grains; you will be attracted to them. He will throw his net; you will be caught in it. A great danger; you must be very careful. The grains that he scatters are very dangerous, because through them you will be caught in the net. A great danger. Oh parrot, the hunter will come. He will throw some grains. You will be attracted towards the grains. He will throw his net and you will be caught. Be careful. Oh parrot, be careful!"

The parrot learned to repeat these words. It would keep on reciting, "Oh parrot, be careful! Oh parrot, be careful! The hunter will come and scatter grains. Don't be attracted to them. He will throw his net and you will be caught. Be careful! Be careful!"And exactly as the bhikkhu had warned, one day the hunter came and scattered some grains. The parrot was attracted to them and the hunter threw his net, ensnaring the parrot. The hunter caught hold of the parrot, which still kept on reciting the same words: "Oh parrot, be careful! The hunter will come. He will scatter grains. He will throw his net. Be careful, be careful!"

A Vipassana meditator who relishes the grains of the hunter becomes entangled in Mara's net. And these pleasant sensations on the body are the grains. This is Mara's snare. When you start relishing them, you are caught. Yet you imagine that, because you are practicing Vipassana, you are becoming liberated, you are approaching the experience of nibbana. Instead you are running in the opposite direction.

This is how the wheel of misery keeps rotating. It always starts with pleasant sensations and with craving towards them. Aversion simply follows. One is not entangled in Mara's snare by the unpleasant sensations. So long as you have craving and clinging for pleasant sensations, you will have aversion towards the unpleasant. The root is your craving for the pleasant. And when free flow occurs you face a dangerous situation. This is the stage at which a subtle craving will start. At the surface of the mind, at the conscious, intellectual level, you will keep saying, "This is anicca, anicca." But deep inside you will start clinging to the experience. You will behave exactly like the parrot that keeps repeating, "Oh parrot, be careful; oh parrot, be careful!"-even after he has been caught because of his craving for the grains scattered by the hunter. You have craving, and as long as the craving exists you cannot come to the end of vedana. (From The Snare of Māra by S. N. Goenka)

I was really struck by this story today. It humbled me, because I've been feeling like I'm on the right path, but I'm really doing the same damned things over and over again. I've gotten really sucked into this idea lately that if so-and-so just behaved a certain way, and xyz project fell into place, that all will be well. Of course, in my clinging to the hope that external events will change, I'm ignoring what I do have control over and responsibility for, namely my own thoughts and actions.

This was a good wake-up call. I cannot follow this path by rote repetition or intellectualizing. That is like standing beside the path and saying "Look, there's the path, and if only so-and-so would get out of my way, and I had some new shoes, and the weather was sunny, I'd walk it!"

The monsters in my head return

We spent some time away this weekend; this was taken from a fishing boat we rented. It seems like most people feel more relaxed when they get away. I wonder if it's a function of panic disorder that I usually feel more tense. I'm away from my usual routine and all the comforts of home. I like knowing where I am and what to expect.

Being away also brings me closer to whatever I've been avoiding. The constant white noise of daily life dies down. There's no minutiae to take care of, and I'm left with the monsters in my head. This weekend they were very loud and insistent, and I realized I have a very insidious problem in the way I relate to my fiancé. This bad habit I have is like a cancer; there's no easy way to remove it because it's entangled in everything I do.

The first step, of course, is awareness.

I've only had about 8 hours sleep total for the past two nights

The Kindness Factor

I was been puzzling over my recent uptick in annoyance levels when I read a brilliant response to an advice column titled "I work with the most annoying man alive."

It begins:

Perhaps you could think of this as your own personal version of the Fear Factor, only it is the Kindness Factor. How could you possibly handle such an annoying guy with kindness? Kind people are in general happy, patient, and lovable people; maybe you could use this guy to help in your own personal development!

I really like this construct. It turns self-inflicted victimization into a personal challenge. I think people tend to feel better about most anything as long as they think they have some degree of control over what happens. Sometimes, of course, the only control we have is how we frame the situation in our own mind, but that's often enough to quell the beast within.

I've been busy taming the beast as of late while wrestling with some personal crises. I find that the less external control I seek and the more internal control I take, the happier I am. The way to tame the beast seems to be in tiny increments; each decision is prefaced with "is this going to reduce stress or create it?" I sent a quick thought via text message that apparently didn't make it onto the blog, so here it is: (edit: this is one of those quotes I've internalized so deeply I thought I came up with it. )

Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional.

I think that nicely rolls up the 4 Noble Truths into a tidy package.

(aside: the mom next to me is asking her toddler "You like cheezburger? You like eet?" It made me LOL.)

Suicide - not always the selfish choice.

I've heard a lot of people say that suicide is a selfish choice, that the person isn't thinking of the pain they cause those behind. *

In my experience, that's a lot of bullshit. I've known people who were suicidal, who have attempted, and a few who have actually done it. The vast majority of them felt like they were a burden on their loved ones and that their loved ones would be better off without them. They felt so alone that they didn't think they'd be missed all that much, or that their loss would hurt all that much.

Well, they were wrong. There's no dispute about that. But suicidal tendencies, by their very nature, necessitate some cognitive distortions. It'd be selfish if they knew they were hurting people, and did it anyway. That's not the case. They believe that their existence is causing people pain, so they are committing the unselfish act of removing themselves from the presence of others, to ease their burden. It's misguided, but they're not exactly thinking coherently.

You know, I've been there. I've sat on my parents' bed with a gun in my hand. (My stepdad was a police officer - he kept the gun hidden, but not well enough. Fortunately for me, he kept the ammo very well hidden.) I've thought that there was no other way out of this pain, and that my continued presence was just dragging down everyone around me. I can see clearly now that this is so much bullshit, but at the time it was like a mantra, and I was incapable of being introduced to new information. People say suicide is a choice. It's not much of one when you're deep in depression. It feels like a choice between peacefully laying on the beach or wrestling wild alligators. That's no choice, that's a certainty. Who the fuck would willingly pick alligators?

I don't have the solutions to suicide. I just don't think it makes sense to demonize the victim by saying that he/she is selfish and (by inference) stupid to have made that choice.

*Generally, these are people who haven't ever been pushed to the edge.

The more things change

It's been... uh... 989 days since I had a cigarette, or even a puff of one.

I want one now. A therapist I used to have would say that I have a bad case of the fuckitalls. You know - those days where you just want to wear all black, listen to loud angry rock, and push old ladies into traffic. Well, maybe not that last part.

You just want to give the finger to society. If you have a bad habit, you indulge in it for its momentary relief. If you had a bad habit, you'll be tempted to pick it up again. If you never had any bad habits, well, you probably aren't going to be inflicted with this syndrome anyway.

I have journals dating back to age 12. I had the fuckitalls nearly constantly, to varying degrees, from ages 12-27. That's a long fucking time and I'm lucky I didn't do any permanent damage. Honestly, I think the only thing that saved me was that none of my friends did drugs, and I wasn't streetsmart enough to go search them out.

I was single the vast majority of that time, and it's easier to deal with it then, because there's no one around to take it personally or reflect your anger back on you (of course, there's also no one to catch you when you fall). I have great difficulty showing this side of myself, because I don't want people to worry. I've made it through far, far worse, and my moodiness is not their burden.

Yet, I am the kind who wears her heart on her sleeve, so when I'm not happy, everyone knows it. What people want is some sort of explanation I can't give. The fuckitalls, by definition, are completely irrational. I can't draw a diagram and show how A progressed to B which caused C. It doesn't really matter how I got to C. It's all damage control now. It's all about seeking shelter from the storm. You can't stop the rain. You can stop standing in the middle of the street.

I like this apartment. Thick walls suitable for blasting music, and no one below us to complain.