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.

One of the themes that I've heard a lot lately has to do with "controlling your story". I've been exposed to this mostly through Inna, since it's one of her beliefs, and has been reinforced for her during her participation in the Landmark Forum, and in the book "Conversations with God" which she gave me three months ago.

The basic premise is that you control what other people think of you, partially through your actions, but also to a large degree in what you tell them about yourself. What you tell people often defines who you are to them. Often, however, we become invested in "stories" that are outdated, unquestioned, and/or don't serve us well. Conversely, if you change what you tell people about yourself, you may well change people's impression of you. And sometimes you can even consciously change your own self-image by telling yourself something different. In this journal entry, I question one such story of mine.

In many ways what I tell people, especially at work and in social situations, boils down to this: I'm older than you think I am. This came about because of the importance I put on living a youthful and energetic lifestyle; in order to confirm to myself that I was succeeding at living "younger than I am", I became attached to surprising people by pointing out the discrepancy between my chronological age and my apparent behavioral age. So far so good, right?

Well, it got to the point where it stopped serving me. Instead of reinforcing my youthfulness, it began to underscore my age. I used it to gain status by reminding people of my long tenure at my workplace. I began using my age not just to explain my energy level, but also to explain the times when I manifested a lack of energy. I began saying things like "I'm an old man!" and making "old man noises", such as groaning when getting out of a chair and complaining of my infirmities. Clearly, what had started as a good thing had permuted into its exact opposite; my age and frailty had replaced my youthfulness as an important part of the image I projected.

So, of course, that had to stop. It's difficult to retrain yourself to control what you say to people, but I think it's more difficult to realize that what you're saying doesn't serve you. So lately I've been trying to stay away from hitting people over the head with the fact that I'm older than most of the people I hang out with, and that I enjoy activities that are more typical of someone in their 20s than someone who is... well... my age (without specifying it any further, of course)! I'm not gonna give up referring to myself in the third person, tho!

This all is somewhat tangential to a philosophical issue that Inna and I had that frustrated her to no end. Forgive me, but this really does require that I talk a little bit about my age, in contrast to what I said above.

One of the "symptoms" of my preoccupation with my age was talking about what I'll call my infirmities: the little complaints that accumulate over time that let you know that you're not as young or as strong as you once were. Knowing back when I was 29 that these will only accumulate as I age, I formulated a philosophy of life that Inna found disturbing, but which I have always found particularly liberating. I began trying to pack as much experience, happiness, and joy into each day of my waning youth, prioritizing things that I wouldn't be able to do later in life as my body aged. I want to do as much as I can, so that when I'm older and not able to do many of these things, I'll have a rich life full of unique experiences to reminisce about. Somehow Inna construed this as horribly defeatist, in that I was setting my expectations of old age as simply inactive convalescence and waiting for death. I, on the other hand, think my philosophy will serve me well at any age, encouraging me to go out and do things for so long as I am physically able.

But that does beg the question of how long I expect to live, and my answer is one that really upset Inna. Trying to be as objective as possible, I don't think I will live to a very old age. I could, of course, be pleasantly surprised, and my life and financial planning will take that into account, but a dispassionate examination of the facts show that the probability is high that I'll die before I get old, fulfilling Mick Jagger's expressed youthful desire. Let's start with gender: I'm male, and men on average do not live longer than women. Add on top of that the fact that I live an urban lifestyle, with the accompanying respiratory issues, which are only exacerbated by my nightclub-going lifestyle. In addition to suffering the hazards of being an urban pedestrian, I'm also an urban cyclist, which engenders a whole cornucopia of potential risks. My family history is, of course, chock full of diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart disease, and so forth. Genetically, I'm at a clear disadvantage. And then, above all, there's the fact that I live alone and in a very isolated lifestyle; it should come as no surprise that, having no potential caretakers nearby, I might not survive incidents that others might easily overcome. I thnk that my family history paints a pretty stark prognosis, which is exacerbated by the fact that I live alone, with no one around to provide emergency assistance.

Looking on the other side of the equation, I do live in a city where I'm within moments of some of the best medical facilities on the planet. On top of that, I do seem to have a very strong constitution and the "infirmities" I do have are nowhere near as serious as those of anyone else I know. My cycling gets me regular exercise, and my weight and metabolism just can't be matched. I think I'm really blessed with great health, and enjoy it immensely. But I also know how quickly someone's health can turn around, and I know my own risk factors, which all lead me to believe that the prudent course is to expect that I will not live so long as most of my peers. Like I say, I'd be delighted to be proven wrong, but I also don't think it's rational to set my expectations in a way that, frankly, ignores the basic facts of the case. I think a reasonable, rational person would not expect me to have a longer-than-average, or even an average lifespan, given what I know of myself. I don't think that's defeatist or fatalist; it's just accepting the facts, and not living in denial. But whatever the case, I have every intention of fully enjoying and consciously experiencing each moment of life that I have left.