Life Like Water

The flowers fall, for all our yearning;
The weeds grow, regardless of our dislike.
- Zen saying

I don’t believe that people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell

Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient being, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying or lamentation - this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it.
- Dogen

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
- La Rouchefoucauld

It seems that every time I think that I’ve the body trained enough to work (well at least to get by if not perform at the level I want) without getting too sore, we do something different and I find a whole new set of muscles that haven’t been doing a damned thing for the last decade.

Last night we did some sparring and I took a shot right in the shin splint which is a whole universe of pain but following that we did escrima. Since I’d never done it before I didn’t get to spar with them but I got to practice the basic heaven six drill. I’m not used to having both arm up and swinging like that but I did get going pretty well with the gentleman who was teaching me the drill. So of course this morning my shoulders are both sore as hell. Fun though. I probably enjoy swinging a weapon more than trying to limber up and train my stiff old frame to be one. Which means, of course, that I need to focus more on the latter.

On a totally different note, my wife got me the zen day calendar for Christmas. I’ve had one page that I saved sitting on my desk for the last two months so I thought I’d put it here as well just so it doesn’t get lost:

Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient beings, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying, or lamentation - this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it.

Dogen

When I first read this I got stuck on the respect/pity part but, after thinking about it for a while, that is probably a reaction to how we frequently conflate pity with superiority rather than simply recognizing pity as sympathy and sorrow for the pain of others. Similarly there shouldn’t be resentment in admitting that there are people with a clearer view and greater compassion than my own any more than I would resent admitting that there are people who are better at math.

So I turned 39 the other day. I didn’t make a big deal about it because I wasn’t certain how I felt about approaching the big “four oh”. Saturday I had a nice time with Jyllian, Josette and Jim; we went out to a local Italian place Jyllian remembered from when she was a kid and had an interesting take on Italian food. Afterwards we had coffee at a local spot and had a nice conversation.

The funny thing is that there was a definite theme to my gifts this year. I received two books on Buddhism (How to Practice by the Dalai Lama and The Joy of Living by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche), a decorative Buddha head in the Malaysian style, a shirt and a pair of shorts. To paraphrase Captain Esteban from Zorro the Gay Blade, I think they’re trying to tell me something…

I also got a kitten but, to be fair, that’s Emily’s cat and not mine. Two kittens were abandoned at out vets office and were destined for the animal shelter and to be put to sleep. We took one, I little girl “cow cat” named Haru (who at this moment is attacking my leg). The boys were pretty freaked out at first but everyone is getting used to everyone else.

I’m also adding a new category to this blog: Fit by Forty. I picked up a copy of Body for Life by Bill Phillips and even if I don’t get my six pack back it won’t continue to be a pony keg.

The last few weeks have been hard. It’s hurt. A lot.

It’s one thing to think about the pain and transience of our lives when things are going well and another entirely when it sneaks up behind you, knocks you down and starts kicking you in the stomach. We grow up beliving that all options are open to us, all paths available. It’s hard when you realize that some ways are now closed and that there are things that we’ll never do or feel again. We can’t go back, we can only go forward.

Jyllian told me one time about how if you ever wanted to switch places with anyone, that to be perfectly honest, you had to take everything that they had. Leaving nothing out. At the same time you had to abandon everything of your own. Your experiences, your memories, the very essence of who your are. You can’t look at someones life from the outside, pick the good parts and splice them into your own life. It’s all or nothing.

I think the same thing goes when we look back at our lives and wish we’d taken a slightly different path. We’re the accumulation of our experiences and even a slight change would require an abandonment of everything we now have. I couldn’t have left Santa Barbara for San Francisco at any other time and still be sitting here in my office listening to my daughter thump around upstairs. I couldn’t have met and married my wife at any other time and had the marriage I cherish today. The forks in the road don’t ever converge again.

Looking at what I have now and the opportunities before me there is no way I would take that gamble that turning right instead of left would have produced a better outcome. It’s a bittersweet waste of time to even speculate on what might have been. There’s no way to know and no way to go back.

What I have is going to hurt for a while. Like an old football injury, there will be moments to come when an unexpected turn of thought will cause it to ache again for the rest of my life. But it’s all or nothing. What I have hurts but is wonderful as well.

I was picking my daughter up at school the other day and noticed a bumper sticker on one of the other cars in the lot that read “Remember who you wanted to be”. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time but who I wanted to be most of all when I was a kid was Yoda. He wasn’t the rebel, he wasn’t the hero, he wasn’t the scoundrel or the villian. When I was eleven years old the person I most wanted to be was quiet, peaceful and wise.

Years later, it was pretty clear that Yoda and his philosophy was modeled after Buddhist and Vedantist thought. This was most obvious when I was watching the Empire Strikes Back with a group of Vedantist monks while staying at the Vedanta Society of Southern California. We clustered around a tiny color television in a small back room and watched as Yoda explained the Force to Luke. Huge smiles broke across the faces of the monks and one exclaimed “Do you hear that? That is Vedanta!”

A decade has passed and my spiritual disciplines are honored more in the breach than in the observance but I think of the little Jedi master more frequently. I’ve tried a number of times to re-establish myself in my meditative practice. I think I’ll do better if I take a page from the little green Jedi’s book and stop trying and start doing.