The Texture of Human Life

This may sound shocking or frightening, but we’re never going to get our act together. We try. We visualize. We sit in meditation. We chant. We do breathing exercises. We plead our case to a higher power. We read spiritual and self-help books. We try to forgive and practice compassion. But no matter how dedicated we are to finding a definitive solution to our problems, they don’t get solved. We can’t just wash our hands of them. When you complete something at the top of your to-do list, something else gets added on at the bottom.

Solutions are temporary. Things come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and they fall apart again. And on and on. Our job is not to try harder or reach for something that will never be in our grasp. We have to change the way we’re approaching it and lower our expectations. The Buddha said, “Serenity comes when you trade expectations for acceptance.” I think he was referring to letting go of how things “should be,” and striving to find peace in the moment, even when it’s challenging. I can’t count how many times I’ve thought to myself, If this one thing could get solved, if only this thing would change, I’d be content. That’s not how it works. A difficult and aggressive neighbor of mine was troubling the rest of the block. I kept hoping he would move and yesterday, he did. I was relieved, but just when I thought my wish had come true and I could relax, my internet went out.

When we’re striving for something to change, no amount of grappling and pleading will make it so. But we can learn to accept it. That doesn’t mean we have to like it. It doesn’t mean we have to feel good about it. It doesn’t mean we have to love someone we don’t love. It doesn’t mean we have to see a situation as good when it isn’t. It’s not about saying okay to everything. After the election, I was suffering and complaining bitterly when a friend said, “I feel exactly the same way you do and so do a ton of other people. But you’re making yourself ill. You don’t have to like it but you have to reach some acceptance. There’s nothing else you can do. You have to learn to tolerate it.”

At this point in my life, I see acceptance as part of the texture of human life. There once was a monk walking in the woods who came upon a flowing river. “What a perfect place to meditate,” he thought. He sat down on a flat rock, closed his eyes and began to breathe. But there was a problem. The sound of the water splashing against the rocks was distracting. He just couldn’t block it out and he was becoming anxious. He took off his shoes, stepped into the icy cold water in his bare feet and started to rearrange the rocks. They were extremely heavy, he strained his back and he fell into the freezing water several times. He tripped on stray rocks under the water and he got scraped. But he persevered. When he completed his task, he felt relieved and proud of himself. He had done it. But when he got back to meditating, the sound of the splashing had become worse. On top of that, his back hurt, his clothes were cold and wet, his arms were bleeding and his feet ached. He saw quite clearly that he couldn’t make things better from the outside in. He had to do it from the inside out. He closed his eyes, he got in touch with his breathing, he stopped resisting and he used the splashing sound as a challenge to deepen his meditation practice.

Resistance causes anxiety. When I’m in that state, I find myself difficult to manage so I’ve come up with a few tools that help. First, I think about being present in my reality. In the now. Then I picture my clenched hands and I imagine unfolding my fingers. I drop my shoulders. I focus on my looping mind and try to slow it down. I feel the tightness in my chest and try to relax it. Most importantly, I stop chastising myself that I ought to be doing better or feeling differently. In the ballet, I didn’t like it when someone else got a role that I wanted or they performed a particular combination better than I did. I felt defeated at first, but when I stopped competing with my fellow dancers and started competing with myself, I didn’t feel good about it, but I felt more fulfilled and at ease. Along the way, other roles came around that I got, and somone else was feeling like I had felt.

The concept of fighting isn’t always a bad thing but it can be misunderstood. I find it upsetting to hear, “He lost his battle with cancer.” I don’t see dying as losing a battle. I see it as something that we all do and there is a time to fight and a time to accept. That doesn’t mean we’re giving up. Stopping the war doesn’t mean we’re quitting on ourselves. Refusing to fight or argue doesn’t mean we’re letting of what we believe. It means that we trust ourselves to know when it’s time to keep fighting and when it’s time to release our grasp on what we can’t change. It doesn’t matter if we look weak or frightened to someone else. What matters is caring enough about ourselves to step out of the line of fire and take shelter in our own kindness. Mark Twain said, “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”