ornoth

I renounced my citizenship in the State of Maine twenty-eight years ago, when I moved away after college. Locals will tell you I’m not a real Mainer anyways; I was still “from away”, having lived there only 24 of my first 25 years.

When I left, I was eager to leave the land of poverty, ignorance, and racism behind me and start a new, adult life in Boston. I did my best to sever all ties with the land of my youth; but there was always one obligation that kept pulling me back: my parents.

For more than two dozen years, I continued making regular trips north to visit. Going back to Maine was always uncomfortable for me, like perpetually picking at the scab covering the many reasons why I’d left; it never fully healed.

That obligation to keep returning came to an end in January, when my mother passed away. My only remaining duty was last week’s interment ceremony, and the brief family gathering in her memory.

So now I can turn my back and leave Augusta for what might well be the very last time, and say perhaps my final farewell to the State of Maine.

I suppose it’s a major life passage. I left three decades ago, but this is truly the final severance of my ties to Maine. It’s the cause for a little bit of melancholy, but a much larger sense of closure, relief, and joy.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t really hate Maine… I carry treasured memories of some of the people and places and experiences of my childhood. But that chapter ended thirty years ago, and there’s no point in lingering in the vicinity of long-past adventures.

It’s futile to cling to people and places that have already undergone three or four decades of change; what’s truly important are the memories I have of them, not the present reality. And unlike the present reality, I can carry those treasured memories with me, no matter where I go.

It’s also ironic that my trip home from Maine involved driving to Boston and flying out of Logan airport. You see, my mother’s death also removed my biggest reason for coming back to pass through Boston.

So this trip was a farewell to Boston, as well. Unlike Maine, Boston is a place I dearly love, where I feel at home, and have lots of recent history that I chose to create. So I’m hoping there will be reasons to visit that bring me back in the future; I just won’t have the convenient opportunity provided by flying in on the way up to Maine.

But even in Boston, a lot of what I loved here is history, and many of the people have moved on. I guess it’s one of those lessons that only comes when one has lived long enough: that clinging to people and places from the past is futile, and the part that matters most—your memories of them—can be taken with you, wherever you choose to live.

Even if you were never to return again.

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.

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