YOUR LIFE – AN ADVENTURE NOVEL OR A LONG SENTENCE?

There was a coffee mug in a cinema staff room where I once worked (who knows, it might still be there), decorated with an Oscar Statuette. The Oscar was supposedly for “Best Supporting Actor in a Continuing Melodrama.”

And the nominees are....?

It seems to me that we get caught up in melodramas when identify with a character we've created and the dramatic stories to justify it, and then believe our own act. We stop playing with life and start playing AT it. Ham acting-out. In such a vulnerable position, we suffer the consequences of our inauthentic act, and resist the very thing that keeps is alive – change – ebb and flow – come and go. We confuse Peace with Stagnation, deny the challenges of change, and wonder why we're dying miserable.

I have written before about about the only constant in life being Change. And it is apparent to me that species who survive best and longest seem to be those who are flexible and best at adapting to challenge and change.

[Yesterday]

We kid ourselves that we'd like today to be pretty much the same as it was yesterday; some people even insist that everything and every one should be comfortably predictable, and ignore the big, red sign that yells “Wrong Way – Dead End – Go Back”

Tony Delroy pointedly asked on the ABC one night “How do we handle the quickening pace and challenge of change with grace and without becoming a basket case?”

Let's get one Ruthless Rule of Reality out on the table first. Life comes with discomfort and challenge. The Buddha called it “dukkha”. And he noted three types of Dukkha --

1) Suffering or Pain (Dukkha-dukkha). Ordinary suffering, including physical, emotional and mental dis-ease, is one form of dukkha. And you don't get life without it. You knew that before you came: somewhere in the excitement you just forgot.

2) The second form of Dukkha is Impermanence or Change (Viparinama-dukkha). Every thing is impermanent, subject to change. That, too, is dukkha. Thus, happiness is dukkha, because it is not permanent; it comes and goes. Great success, which fades with the passing of time, is dukkha. Even the purest state of bliss experienced in spiritual practice is dukkha. Because it comes and goes. We have it, we lose it, some of us get it again, most of us go looking for cheap alternatives.

This doesn't mean that happiness, success ecstasy and bliss are bad, or that it's wrong to enjoy them. If you feel happy, then enjoy feeling happy. If you're suffering, get into it. Find a way to enjoy it. Just cover your mouth, don't spray your stuff all over the bus. And don't hang on to it. Allow whatever life brings you to flow on through.

Dukkha #3. is Conditioned States (Samkhara-dukkha). To be conditioned is to be dependent on or affected by something else. For centuries Buddhists believed that all phenomena are conditioned. And quantum and meta- physics have now proved Buddha right. Everything affects everything else. There's no separation, and no exemptions. When everything is changing around us, we change with it, or go under. You don't have to like change; it's just a lot easier if you do.

LIFE IS CHANGE: CHANGE IS LIFE

Regardless of how it may seem to you, every sentient being has difficulties. We sail troubled seas. The ones who seem to do it easily have taken the time and trouble to read the winds and tides and set their sails accordingly. Others on the same ocean, get wrecked on the rocks of Denial and Resistance.

So the difference isn't the climate, but how you go along with the plot and handle the conditions. If you've developed sailing skills, you're more likely to welcome a bit of a blow, and feel exhilaration at scudding through the open ocean. If, on the other hand, you suffer over your trials and tribulations, it's your suffering that's the problem, not what you're suffering about. 

 

If you think you didn't sign on for change and challenge, I put it to you that you're kidding yourself. You have inconveniently forgotten that this experience you've got may be exactly what you came for. Whatever – it's what you've got. Why? Well, try this – wherever you were before you showed up here got boring! So you signed on for this virtual (not-real) Adventure Holiday. (If you haven't seen it, get out a copy of Arnie Schwartzenegger's “Total Recall” – you'll get what I mean.)

Minor changes buff and polish us, improving our lustre and sparkle and others see their own reflections better in us. Major shifts invalidate our habits, break open our pretences and delusions and invite us to to new ways of seeing and deeper awareness of reality. Turnabouts trigger turnarounds, exposing qualities we did not know we had. Adversity provokes us to appreciate the gentler, kinder pastel shades of living love. After the grey, cold fallow of winter. sunny spring days warm these old cockles with simple joy.

[Here We Go Again]

Here's a question – do you experience change and challenge as happening TO you or FOR you? Your answer right then was a fine barometer to the state of your Gross Happiness Account.

Why are we so automatically resistant to change? Off the top of my head I'd say, out of habit, firstly because change opens up something Unknown and every mind hates to not-know. Secondly, we tend to fill our lives to the brim with goals, hopes, addictions, tasks, rituals, chores, appointments and trivialities. We leave no room on our schedules for surprises and contingencies. Change seriously threatens to upset a very precariously teetering applecart. 
 

Any bolt out of the blue triggers shock reactions in the switchroom of the brain, firing off instructions to organs and muscles and initiating physical, emotional and psychological reactions and responses as the body deals with the perceived crisis. In a blocked, inflexible person, these reactions will be far more traumatic than for someone more flexible and adaptive. Resistance is pain.

Regardless of our temperament, the unexpected always throws things out of kilter. It's a matter of degree. There was a time in the first 4 decades of my life when something as trivial as misplacing my car keys might lead to me chucking a major wobbly. By way of contrast, 12 years ago I lost my daughter to brain damage, my mother died, I changed my job, moved house from Gippsland to Adelaide, and was diagnosed with depression and chronic anxiety, all in the space of a few bewildering months. I am pleased to observe that I came through that ordeal, certainly scathed but, a better person. So what had I learned in the interim?

[I'm Still Standing]

Don't wait for the sky to fall in. There's a smorgasbörd of available ways and means to cultivate spiritual, emotional and physical calm and equilibrium. Do some research, experiment and pick flavours that suit and work for you.