George Carlin had a bit about that wherein he said that he couldn’t understand ethnic or racial pride.
I’ve never understood national pride. I’ve never understood ethnic pride… because… I’m Irish... and when I was a kid, I would go to the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, and I noticed that they sold a button that said “Proud to be Irish” and I could never understand that because I knew that on Columbus Day they sold a different button that said “Proud to be Italian.”
Then came Black Pride, and Puerto Rican Pride… and I could never understand ethnic or national pride because to me, pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own. Not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn’t a skill. It’s a fuckin genetic accident! You wouldn’t say “I’m proud to be 5’ 11.” I’m proud to have a predisposition to colon cancer.” So why the fuck would you be proud to be Irish or proud to be Italian or American or anything?
I am well aware that given the tumult of my younger years, had I been born into the body of a black or North Korean child, this book likely wouldn’t have come together – I… likely wouldn’t have come together… not in this time, not in this way. But I am also very aware that each of us experience suffering, regardless of what bag of flesh we were born into. And in your life, you are met with situations, subjective to you, that rip your heart apart. Everything you think you know about control, about human will and superiority, ego, about the resolve of your beliefs – all of it, up for grabs.
I think the cost of developing something reliable to say is steeped in its ability to positively undo you. And in the moment, isn’t it just carnage? Mayhem? Absolutely impossible. And that’s what suffering feels like. In that moment a dread undertakes you and on your good days, you remember that control isn’t so much your ability to manipulate the outside world to suit your needs as it is to be malleable, and that real control is our reaction to what has already occurred.
And isn’t suffering where we want to have the greatest pissing matches with one another? This thing we say we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies we then use as a tool to hold another person’s suffering hostage as if their pain isn’t subjectively painful, nonetheless. But we get so defensive about what we have been through, we forget that everyone else is going through some shit, too.
What I mean to say is that we cannot understand what lies outside of the limits of our own suffering until we move beyond the rat-race of constant one-upmanship of others. We all go through the fucking ringer.
And to live in such an arrangement to be protected from suffering, I would argue that for those most sheltered that their gamble may the most wanton, reckless, and if we really take things to their logical conclusions, truly the most ill sought after if we consider what is truly at stake here. Right then. What is the consequence of a life unexamined, bereft of limitations and full of hope? What does this look like at the end of life? These people come to their very endings having been pampered and ushered away all their life from that which would seek to undo them and their illusory ideas of control. Having never known a day of struggle in their lives, it will be a hard pill to swallow when the bill comes due.
I attended a dying man who was once a federal judge. If it wasn’t obvious by all of the plaques, degrees, and framed letters from politicians on the walls in the room above his bed, his wife made sure to tell me about all of the prestige and accomplishments his career had garnered him while she refused to look over at the man behind those titles who was drawing his final breaths.
They had bought everything: a nice home in an upper-middle class neighborhood, two big cars, lots of vacations from the looks of some of the photos. The adult kids on the walls didn’t look like they were hiding their malcontent behind the smiles in the photos next to their parents. Everything appeared curtailed to demonstrate that the universe had been on their side the whole way through.
The universe was not on this man’s side that night. When we arrived no drugs nor chest compressions nor status or title would satisfy the protestations from his wife that it could be any way otherwise. That her husband was dead. And in that grounding reality the lines of division begin to blur. Her husband wasn’t conscious when we got there, and likely had not been for a while. I do not know how his final moments of lucidity were articulated however I can say that in my experiences, most people who were lucid in similar arrangements went kicking and screaming, as if death was never on the table. It is not the awe-inspiring image that comes to mind when Winston Churchill told is not to go gentle into that good night.
Failure was never an option. And that rationale carried to the bitter end. This was not the case with everyone I met. I am telling you friends that failure is not inherently bad. and this is the proof. The end is only bitter when failure is the end of the world. Death is the failure to continue living. It had to happen that way.
See, I think it is those failures in life where control is seen by its proper function of the game: The Chance Card. Everything changes: sometimes good, sometimes bad. “Maybe” as the old Chinese farmer said:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.”
The farmer said, “Maybe.”
The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!”
The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad.”
And the farmer responded, “Maybe.”
The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!”
Again, he said, “Maybe.”
We can put on rose-tinted glasses and pretend that it doesn’t exist, but when suffering claims its rightful, frequent, and dutiful place in our lives we will be left with a sense of being stolen from, alienated as we are confronted with the rose-tinted demeanors of our peers. What this more clearly looks like when stripping away the layers is that people just simply do not know one another anymore. And by that I mean we are not sincere. But let us look at the word sincere and perhaps walk away with a better understanding of what I mean by this:
Now the Latin word for wax is cera. We have borrowed a Latin prefix and it appears often in English: sin, meaning “without.” Though the word has probably been used for centuries now as a synonym for “honest,” “faithful,” “pure,” and the like and has been used to evoke an inner quality of intent, the simplicity of the thing, courtesy of the stone trade, is this: sincere has a less abstract meaning, and always has. It means “without wax.” It means, “Alas, the holes show.” And this quality isn’t held in particularly high esteem in a time and place… where authenticity is sacrificed for marketability time and time again. (Jenkinson, 2018 p. 357).
Jenkinson goes on to write that it is because we are so busy trying to put on a good face that despite our best intentions we hoodwink the people around us, particularly those who are younger and turn to their elders as a barometer for where in their life they are. As comedian Louis C.K. put it,
Everything’s amazing but nobody’s happy.
And that’s the lie we tell everyone around us, starting with ourselves. It is because we are unable to be real with others about the things that make us feel the most in this short life that they in turn struggle to connect with us.
And so often the people who have seen the bait-and-switch and refuse to participate in its pageantry of denial are then exiled from the dominant culture and ostracized for their inability to “get it together” or “pull one up by one’s own bootstraps.” This is evidenced from our abhorrent treatment of veterans returning to civilian life to the domestic abuse victim. Why do we get so uncomfortable around people who are struggling with their own mortality or with their own ability to control their environment? So often we immediately build up defenses about how we are more prepared or how we are different.
Those hard and fast divisions. And that festers for both parties. One becomes more disenchanted from objective reality and the other becomes nihilistic to the systems and moral order that cast them away. From these hard and fast divisions come the crisis of envy, anger, resentment, and what becomes the Western ideological showdown of good versus evil, us versus them.
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.
Quenten Tarantino may have taken creative liberty with the Bible, but there again Christ told us to distrust institutions that told us we were separate and who placed a man between us and God. (Moreover, let us not forget that Jesus was not a Christain).
We will all experiencing suffering. Yet it is for us to decide what suffering we endure. For though we cannot escape suffering’s first arrow, it is the second arrow of suffering that causes us the most pain. The physical wounds gone the pain of its memory remains.
They say time heals all wounds, but I think the saying has mistaken the tree for the forest as it were. See, I think context heals wounds. But first, neti neti. Time does not heal all wounds. Some wounds only fester with time and develop into hard-grained delusions. Science has shown that after the age of 35, parts of the brain begin to calcify and die off, such as the frontal lobe and the pineal gland. This is where the idiom “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” comes from. Moreover, eastern schools of Buddhism and Hinduism historically would not accept students into their schools that were aged over 30 years, coming from the position of a firm mind that would not be open to being changed.
Context adds perspective to a subjectively bad situation. We create our own reality. Animals suffer when they are physically hurt. Dogs and domesticated animals surely love and express similar emotions to those of humans (for whom this bond of domestication dates back to our own and existed in symbiosis of one another, as opposed to the personalities of cats and other domesticated animals), but the home security systems confirm that they do not lament over their troubles. Even dogs that destroy the house when the owners are gone are doing so from a place of boredom. They are unable to deny their instincts to play, chew, and just be dogs.
Humans on the other hand suffer all the time. Does any other animal suffer to the depth that which a human does? Buddhism refers to this as the second arrow of suffering. The first arrow is the physical insult. Hunger, pain, cold, unchangeable outside circumstances. The second arrow, however, the one which hurts the most is the second arrow of suffering. This is the suffering we inflict on ourselves from unresolved and unexamined emotions and tensions. Blame, victimhood, anger, jealousy, resentment. All reactions to unchanging circumstances. Moreover, when this is the base all resolutions will come from that supposition. Time CLEARLY does not heal all wounds.
Context, however, adds the dimensions of multiple sides of the coke can. Perspective brings understanding. It can still hurt, but that hurt is shared. There is a Taoist story about a student who was asked to bring a cup of salty water to the shore of a massive lake of fresh water. The master instructed the student to drink from the cup of salty water. He tried but was unable to muster more than a sip or two. “The water is too salty for me to drink Master.” “This vessel which holds the water is your body. It’s contents, the salty water, is your suffering. Too much for one man. Now dump the glass in this water.” The student did and was then instructed to fill it back up from the lake. “Now drink. The suffering one experiences is diluted when taken in the context of the suffering of those around us. Moreover, the cup only remains full when we think it was ours to hold on to.”
Time is the medium for which it takes context to fill the missing pieces. Time carries us in its bousum and shields us until the context shows itself. But time alone without the context merely shields us like an overprotective mother. And just like mom, we will fight tooth and nail against our assumptions until the reminder goes from gentle to grandiose. Someone far smarter than I said “when Samsara occurs all the time, you are having a mental breakdown. When spaced apart, you are just bored longer.”
Lou Tzu says the Tao is like water: it takes the shape of the spaces it fills and finds the lowest places. When still water is transparent and reflective, the power to take life but also the vital essence to life itself. And didn’t Jesus say to be near the people deemed lowest by society? Those who show their holes? Sincere: without wax.