Ornoth

Twenty-five years ago was my wedding day. I wasn’t going to write anything about it, but I suppose a few off-the-cuff thoughts would be appropriate.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times: our relationship was the proverbial two-edged knife. I’ve always tried to treasure the amazing joys it provided; and these days I look back on the intense pain it ended in with a lot more compassion, both for myself and for the woman who accompanied me.

Lord knows neither of us were emotionally mature enough to manage that relationship very well. In that sense, the marriage was a crucible of self-learning. There’s nothing that will reveal your own faults more starkly than sharing your life with another person. But it also showed us our potential and our worth, as well.

Marriage caused us both to experience a lot of growth… it’s just sad that so much of it came as a result of our relationship’s unforeseen and rapid collapse.

For me, one of those lessons was that some questions will never have adequate answers. Why did it fail? How much was my fault? How much hers? How much was real and how much was fake? After the divorce, I found it difficult to deal with not having any answers; as a child I had wanted to live forever just so that I could see and know “how it all turned out”. With my marriage, I saw it and lived it, but I will never fully know what happened.

Another lesson has been that you can’t go back. I daresay we both lost a lot of our innocence when we separated. Many years have passed since then, but although time heals, deep wounds also leave enduring scars. The simple, complete faith I had in her—and she in I—isn’t something that I could ever extend again. You never love as deeply and vulnerably as you do before you’ve had your first heartbreak.

Looking back, the flaws we never saw seem obvious now, and trivial when compared to the connection and potential that we shared. If I were to remarry (an extremely unlikely event), would I make better choices now and avoid the mistakes that destroyed the most precious thing I ever had? I’m wise enough now to know that, no matter how much I’ve matured emotionally, it’s impossible to say. But certainly I’ve stopped believing that any woman is Snow White, and no man—even me—is Prince Charming.

The joys… they were amazing, fulfilling, and I will treasure them every day of my life. They haven’t invented words to describe how happy I was on that day 25 years ago. But those few years of joy came at the price of many more years spent bearing the pain of the breakup.

You might find it unsatisfying that I can’t resolve those two extremes and synthesize them into a single emotional state—positive, negative, or neutral—but that too is the complex nature of marriage and divorce. There is no unambiguous “bottom line”. It was what it was: the most amazing, the most painful, and possibly the most educational experience I’ve ever been through.

And that’s really all I can leave you with.

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.