Looking Great Togetherr

There are so many things to do but days too when the energy to do them is low. I have always struggled with giving myself a break. After nearly sixty-two years, I am still struggling!

I think we learn to struggle early  on in life. God knows, maybe struggling is in our genes. We are born with it. Trying to unlearn struggling is herculean. Who knows but it may not be possible. Maybe it has a place in the world.

While our lives often feel like one continuous struggle (Buddhist call this dukkha), success comes like punctuation marks, often unrelated to the struggle. Oh, suffering sometimes reaches an intensity when we try harder and what we seek comes about. Even then, what happens is a result of conditions only one of which is our struggling harder. Most of these conditions stem from all kinds of points outside us. 

We live such insular lives because our minds make us the center of everything happening around us. We call this "experience." To everyone, his or her experience is at the center of the known universe. We live in a sea of centers, each one believing his or her center to be the true center of it all. Copernicus' insight that got Galileo in trouble with the Catholic Church was a pivotal insight in the course of human evolution because for the first time human beings recognized that they were not the center of all creation.

Like the center in which we see ourselves, happiness too seems a creation of the mind. I took a sabbatical from clinical work to free myself of external constraints. I love working alone but external constraints now fewer have become occasions for greater creativity. Tony is coming for lunch. His visit is like a punctuation mark in my daily routines. Punctuation marks not only indicate pauses or stops; the marks themselves call attention to the sentence, the paragraph, the entire written work we are reading.

Suffering is like that, too. We don't like it when it comes but many times it is when we take unusual effort to make something happen and that is enough to push the other conditions into realizing what we desire.

Perfection, too, like happiness is like this. We grow to believe we know what is right and true. It's the same delusion as the idea we are the center of all happenings in the universe. Everyone is like me. Everyone speaks from his or her experience and thinks it as gospel truth. Everyone is an expert. Media—newspapers, books, the Internet, colleges, churches—they all are experts preaching to us about gospel truth. After a while groups of people begin to think the world is as it is preached. We form cliques, communities, peoples, and nations.

Beauty belongs to the same category of delusion. Each culture has its own set of ideas, including ideas of perfection, of beauty. In a global age when cultures converse with each other more readily ideas come together creating monolithic structures. No matter how big and singular they become, ideas are no more true than what one person believes.

Suffering punctuates our lives if we are lucky. (If we are not, the whole of our life feels like suffering with no beginning or end.) It has a place in the world after all. All are conditions that come together in various ways, like a salad or a fruit cocktail.

I took this photo this morning without setting up the lighting correctly. I forced the camera to shoot. The resolution is poor but I like the combination of orange and blue. Like colors complementing each other because they are opposites, life's various conditions unbalance and balance in an endless cycle that defies comprehension. We take note of what is coming together or falling apart: punctuation. 

Struggle punctuates our lives. We should be so lucky to have it!