While walking home from the grocery store today I dropped a gallon of milk. The plastic split and all of the milk spilled on the sidewalk and into the street. I was grumpy about this as I walked back to the store until, fully formed and without my volition came into my head, "Don't cry over spilt milk," which made me laugh.
This is a minor unpleasantness, of course. It is just milk. I have enough money to buy more. It's a hassle and a waste, but it's no big deal. But we all have experienced much more bitter disappointments, failures, and disasters. The challenge of delighting (a subject I began last week) is much greater with the difficult things we must face than those that are wonderful or neutral. This is where the grist for the mill of mindfulness resides.
It is easy to say that one should merely accept all things as being as they are. While this is true as far as it goes, the problem is that some things really do feel very odious. Pain is by definition unpleasant. The death of a loved one feels as if it will rip us apart. Loss of our dreams, hopes, aspirations or good fortune digs a deep pit of despair. To say we should accept these things with equanimity seems more than just a bit facile, the breezy recommendation of one who has never experienced them. (I wrote a post a few months ago about The Happy Bird, who asked that everyone "sing a little happy song when every little thing goes wrong". The point of this story is that everyone wants to strangle the little shit).
A good friend of ours has a young friend (only 20 years old) who was in a terrible car accident a few weeks ago and may not have much of a recovery. When my friend went to a coworker and said, "This just isn't good", her friend immediately said, "Oh, we don't know it's not a good thing!" Well...yes, we do.
Acceptance is not denial. Acceptance is the idea that everything is as it is. There is no judgment of good or bad in acceptance. Everything must be as it is because if it could be otherwise, it would be. Wishing it were different cannot make it so. Wishing it were different, inveighing against how bad things are, how those who don't deserve such suffering should not have to go through such things, and how those who are evil sometimes get much more of the good than they should, does not tip the scale one way or the other.
What such thinking does is increase the suffering in the world. The Buddha spoke of two darts; the first dart is the original injury, which he acknowledged is not a pleasant experience. But the second dart is this insistence that the first dart should never have injured us, that it's not fair that we should be hurt by a dart when so many go unhurt, our demand for justice. We read all the time about families who carry bitterness and a desire for revenge for years after a loved one has been hurt. I see them as bristling with darts, weighed down by the poison of them. And only the first of those darts was put there by someone else.
How much more wonderful would it be if we could find it in our hearts to accept what is, not to believe that all things are "as they are meant to be" or "part of God's plan", but merely that they are as they are. We can delight in the difficult because it gives us the opportunity to practice what we know of the Dharma, to look to the Buddha and ask how this can be the road to enlightenment. There is an answer in who he was, in what his teachings are, if we open our hearts to them.
This is a minor unpleasantness, of course. It is just milk. I have enough money to buy more. It's a hassle and a waste, but it's no big deal. But we all have experienced much more bitter disappointments, failures, and disasters. The challenge of delighting (a subject I began last week) is much greater with the difficult things we must face than those that are wonderful or neutral. This is where the grist for the mill of mindfulness resides.
It is easy to say that one should merely accept all things as being as they are. While this is true as far as it goes, the problem is that some things really do feel very odious. Pain is by definition unpleasant. The death of a loved one feels as if it will rip us apart. Loss of our dreams, hopes, aspirations or good fortune digs a deep pit of despair. To say we should accept these things with equanimity seems more than just a bit facile, the breezy recommendation of one who has never experienced them. (I wrote a post a few months ago about The Happy Bird, who asked that everyone "sing a little happy song when every little thing goes wrong". The point of this story is that everyone wants to strangle the little shit).A good friend of ours has a young friend (only 20 years old) who was in a terrible car accident a few weeks ago and may not have much of a recovery. When my friend went to a coworker and said, "This just isn't good", her friend immediately said, "Oh, we don't know it's not a good thing!" Well...yes, we do.
Acceptance is not denial. Acceptance is the idea that everything is as it is. There is no judgment of good or bad in acceptance. Everything must be as it is because if it could be otherwise, it would be. Wishing it were different cannot make it so. Wishing it were different, inveighing against how bad things are, how those who don't deserve such suffering should not have to go through such things, and how those who are evil sometimes get much more of the good than they should, does not tip the scale one way or the other.
How much more wonderful would it be if we could find it in our hearts to accept what is, not to believe that all things are "as they are meant to be" or "part of God's plan", but merely that they are as they are. We can delight in the difficult because it gives us the opportunity to practice what we know of the Dharma, to look to the Buddha and ask how this can be the road to enlightenment. There is an answer in who he was, in what his teachings are, if we open our hearts to them.
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