I’ve been lying around here like a lump on this incredibly grey and wet day here in Portland, feeling blue and lethargic. It’s one of those seasonal-affective-disorder days, to be sure. Amid all this darkness, I’m finding it difficult to find some semblance of light. (Literally or figuratively.) The Carly Simon lyrics go through my head:
Sufferin’ was the only thing made me feel I was alive
Thought that’s just how much it cost to survive in this world
(“Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” - 1974)
As I was sitting here at the computer earlier this morning, toying with ideas for what to write about today, an email came in from one of my new blog readers. It was a brief message, wishing me well. “My most heartfelt hope and prayer for you for 2006, besides transition to a wonderful job in a location that you love, is freedom and release,” she (“C”) says.
Freedom & release. I’m thinking that C just might understand a little bit of what I’ve talked about here in these pages: for example, that I’m in Zwischenraum, literally “the space between things.” In love and work, I’ve been let go and am stranded in a lifeboat between two islands: having left both, not knowing my destination in either. And, she apparently understands my discussion of psychic prisons: the sense that I am still the prisoner, even though I’ve left the cave. I have not yet thrown off the chains because I’m being blinded by the light outside, fearful of the unknown, and paralyzed by the number of choices I have. When C and I were together, I was quite attached to my interpretation of the shadows on the cave wall. My life, thought to be on course, was dramatically altered by rejection, both personally and professionally. Yes, I have been freed and released; now it’s up to me to find freedom and release.
So, I turn to Richard Bach and the Messiah’s Handbook. As you’ll recall from Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, one merely needs to open this book up to a random (unnumbered) page, and the answer to your question is there. Today, as I’m ruminating over my life’s issues, I read:
“The only way to win, sometimes, is to surrender.”
Which, of course, is exactly right. As I was thinking about the Carly Simon lyrics and “sufferin’,” I was also pondering the first two of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.
1. Life means suffering. To live means to suffer, because the human nature is not perfect and neither is the world we live in. During our lifetime, we inevitably have to endure physical suffering such as pain, sickness, injury, tiredness, old age, and eventually death; and we have to endure psychological suffering like sadness, fear, frustration, disappointment, and depression. We are never able to keep permanently what we strive for, and just as happy moments pass by, we ourselves and our loved ones will pass away one day.
2. The origin of suffering is attachment. The origin of suffering is attachment to transient things and the ignorance thereof. The reasons for suffering are desire, passion, ardor, pursue of wealth and prestige, striving for fame and popularity, or in short: craving and clinging . Because the objects of our attachment are transient, their loss is inevitable, thus suffering will necessarily follow. Objects of attachment also include the idea of a “self” which is a delusion, because there is no abiding self. What we call “self” is just an imagined entity, and we are merely a part of the ceaseless becoming of the universe.
I admit attachment to certain models of the universe. I was attached to living in Eugene, doing a job that I knew and did well, and was comfortable in. And, I was very attached to a model of a relationship that existed, apparently only on the cave wall. What I “knew” was not “truth.” Attachment to both of those models of the world has caused, and still causes, me much suffering. The most healthy thing I could do is to surrender to the universe, define it as “all perfect” and make a new life for myself.
I am trying.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
(“Serenity Prayer,” Reinhold Neibuhr — 1926)