Life on Pleasant Street

[ornoth]

I recently attended a five-week practice group with CIMC’s teacher Michael Liebenson Grady entitled “Wisdom: From Reactivity to Discernment”. One of our homework exercises was to spend a week noting whenever we had a pleasant experience, and to explore the nature of our reaction to it.

So on the way home from that session, I started taking mental notes. I didn’t discern any particular clinging to pleasant experiences, but I did notice the quantity of them, so I started counting: one, two, three… By the end of the week I had noted over two thousand three hundred pleasant experiences, which translates to one every minute or two of waking time.

Now, granted, this was one of the first weeks in May, when everything was just coming into bloom. The week also included cherished time spent with my dharma friends and our expedition to see the Dalai Lama. But interestingly, the rate of pleasant experiences was highest when I was out on the bike, riding through the countryside, seeing a lot of sights.

Most striking, though, was the sheer number of positive experiences, especially in contrast with our homework the week before, which was to note negative experiences, which had numbered no more than a couple dozen.

That discrepancy really made me stop and reflect, and I’ve got a few thoughts about it that I’d like to share.

When you’re young, you spend an awful lot of time and energy focusing on improving the material quality of your life: getting a good job, a good family, and a good home full of material wealth. I did that once, and had some success at it. Below a certain point, there is a very real enhancement to quality of life by improving one’s material standing.

But there’s a limit. Contrary to the totemic human belief that more is better, beyond a certain level, wealth and stuff gradually lose their effectiveness in enhancing one’s happiness. At that point, how one relates to the world becomes more important than material desires.

I’ve long held the belief that, irrespective of circumstances, people make their own happiness and sorrow. Some people’s minds are just wired to see the good things in life, and they can see beauty in even the most unlikely places; conversely, there are people whose natural inclination is to overlook the good and see only the flaws and problems in life.

I was fortunate: I started transitioning from the latter to the former around the time I entered college, and I think I’ve made pretty good progress. These days, no matter where I go, I find myself surrounded with cool, interesting, and beautiful stuff: stuff worth not just noting, but thoroughly enjoying and celebrating. In the process, my perceived quality of life has increased dramatically, way out of proportion with the material reality.

But I was still surprised at the overwhelming number of positive experiences I was noting. Sure, I thought my life was good and I know I treasure parts of it that others fail to appreciate, but I never dreamed the balance was so radically lopsided. Sure, there are occasional, inevitable problems, but on balance I really, really love my life and the elements that comprise it, from the smallest to the largest.

I think the next step for me is to fully experience that imbalance and somehow integrate it into my overall sense of well-being and satisfaction. I still have a lot of behaviors, such as judgmentalism, that are lingering residue from a time when I thought life was less satisfying, less enjoyable. But if I am really that happy with my life, I need to put more effort into internalizing it, because someone with that strong a sense of satisfaction should project a very different presence than the one I’ve retained from my youth due to unexamined habit.

Granted, this wasn’t what the practice group was designed to bring out, but I find that the growth of wisdom is seldom so linear a process. It’s kind of like striking a vein of silver in the middle of a gold mine: unexpected, but equally precious.

I noted one other implication when I examined my reaction to all those pleasant experiences. According to Buddhist psychology, one would expect there to be some sense of clinging to a pleasant experience, a desire to preserve it or keep it from changing or fading away. While I looked, I noticed very little of that clinging in myself. I attribute that to the sheer number of positive experiences, and the confidence it gives me to let go of Experience X in full knowledge that there’ll be another pleasant Experience Y coming along very soon.

It remains to be seen whether this constitutes a more advanced form of clinging to pleasant experiences in general, as a class, rather than as singular individual experiences. Clearly, more sitting is required.

I’ll have another set of serendipitous revelations coming from that group, as well, but I haven’t gotten them down into phosphor yet.

Comments

[lothie.livejournal.com]

I've always said that you make your own "luck", your own happiness of lack thereof. I've been in a down period lately, but I haven't lost sight of that, and for all of it...I'm happy. :)

[f-l-i-r-t.livejournal.com]

Wonderful read, and something I have really been trying to embrace. The idea of experiencing, living in the moment and seeing the beauty and feeling the 'pleasant experiences' - I believe is a conscious exercise at first. I have had a mind shift and have been moving toward that path for a few years now. It makes a huge difference to quality of life.

[rhillai.livejournal.com]

Hey Orn,
Just a question for you. Not that you need answer. From your posting, "I noticed very little of that clinging in myself. I attribute that to the sheer number of positive experiences, and the confidence it gives me to let go of Experience X in full knowledge that there’ll be another pleasant Experience Y coming along very soon."

So, if you had very, very few positive experiences, could you still have "very little of that clinging" in yourself? When things are in abundance, it is very easy to let go of them, for as you've stated, you know another will be along very soon. But, when things are rare, it is much harder to let go. The principle of letting go should be there no matter the abundance, which is why I ask the question (not just to you but I've asked it of myself, too).

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Well, for me that's a theoretical question, because I can't envision a scenario where I'd be removed from positive experiences, which would somehow have to exclude me from cool urban stuff as well as beautiful rural stuff. No sunbeams, kittycats, ice cream, money, or wimmin...

In theory you're right, but the only scenario I can posit where that might actually apply is in the face of death, but that's obviously a very special case in many ways, and one where we can't really predict how we'll respond.

I dunno. Can you think of a real-world example that either of us could relate to? It'd have to be an awful lot of deprivation to limit one's positive experience so dramatically. Or, alternately, the kind of wholesale change in outlook I mention above, but in reverse, where you somehow "stop registering" those events as positive.