Tao and Zen

Originally posted in my LiveJournal on 4/26/2002

It's time for one of my philosophical treatises, wherein I blow smoke out my ass and everyone skims over the entry. This is not a problem for me as I write mostly for myself, just as I talk just to hear my own honeyed tones. Whatever.

I've been doing some thinking about life. Over the years I've often said that life is what you make of it, and then of course I get arguments from all sides about how sometimes you can't help the things life throws at you. And of course, that's true. You can't. Sometimes it's just beyond your control.

But I will repeat this till I get hoarse, and then I'll put up little signs: How you feel about your life is TOTALLY up to you. You can take one hell of a good life and paint it to look like pure misery; likewise, you can take disaster after disaster and still answer "Never better" when someone asks you how you are. It is up to you, what you make of the circumstances that life will throw at you.

One morning I was in a terrible funk. I kept repeating a certain thing over and over to myself. It was something that wounded me so deeply, that not only made a fresh cut but that opened up every single goddamned wound I'd had from babyhood on. Every rejection, every taunt, every time someone let me know that I wasn't, in some way, good enough -- it all came to the surface. I felt like the most worthless person on Earth.

And then, all of a sudden, I had a flash of insight. Nobody was doing this to me. I was doing this to myself. There was nobody in my life who even wanted me to feel this horrible. Only I did -- because painful as it was, it was easier than believing in myself.

In the film Pretty Woman, Richard Gere tries to tell Julia Roberts that she doesn't need to be a hooker, that she is much more intelligent and talented than that. She replies, "When you start to believe in yourself, people put you down. The bad stuff is easier to believe." It is, too. Believing the "bad stuff" allows you to avoid responsibility for making your life everything it could be, because when something goes wrong, you can just shake your head and say, "Well, I suck, that's why."

I'm going to really go out on a limb and say this: anybody who can read this has a good life. OK, wait, before you scream at me -- yes, I know, the specific circumstances might suck. Please believe me when I say that I have been there. I have, at the beginning of many months, questioned whether we should pay the rent, pay the bills, or buy food. I have been homeless (though never, thank god, actually on the street). I have been too sick to move. I've been jilted more often than I can count (literally -- ok, maybe I can count that high but it would take a while). I've been a single mom without a job...and so on. And I know that it's very, very hard to take those lemons and make lemonade when you don't have the money for the sugar.

On the other hand, while it may help, having disposable cash, good health, and great sex doesn't automatically make your life perfect, not if you're still believing the bad stuff. How happy you are about your fortune or lack thereof is directly related to how you feel about YOU. I believe this because I know that circumstances can change in the blink of an eye. Right now I have money, relative good health, and lots of love in my life. I could lose ALL of that tomorrow -- hell, I've been closer to the edge than I'd like to think several times in the past year and change. Even just a month or so ago I made tentative plans in case we lost our ability to pay rent and had to live out of our cars (see, we're lucky, we have two and his is paid for). I was tremendously cheerful as I did this, because I really didn't see the point in panicking and getting depressed about it. We've been up, we've been down, and we'll probably be up and down again. I've done the panicking and the despair and I just can't do it anymore.

I think that a fine whine should, at times, be enjoyed. I know I certainly do. I love to rant and rave and piss and moan -- my mother used to say that you knew I was ok as long as I was kicking up a fuss, that you should only really WORRY about me if I got quiet. But I also know that sometimes you can forget to see the forest for the trees. You maybe can't afford to buy the sugar to make lemonade from those lemons...but I'll bet you know where to get some honey. C'mon. You do. You know it.

And before anybody kicks my ass -- I'm writing this for ME, too. I never want to spend another morning crying because of the "bad stuff". Life is WAY too short for that.

G'bless.