Category Archives: Three Truths and One Wish

Three Truths and One Wish

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1. Truth: Pain is inevitable. There really is no way to be in this world, live this life without getting your ass kicked. Just showing up guarantees it. You can try what you might to numb yourself to the pain, but what you do to numb it only brings about more, which you then have to numb, which brings more, and so on and so on until you are dead. It won’t work.

Reality is brutal, and that’s the truth. You will get hurt, you will lose things, you will fail, bones will be broken, angry words will be said that you can’t take back, you will get sick and old, things won’t be fair, and a mess will be made. Your boss will be a jerk. You’ll get a dog, love it with your whole heart, and before you could ever be ready for it, before you’ve had enough time, he will die. Someone you love will get cancer, the treatments won’t work, and she will die too. In fact, everyone you ever love is going to die. The end.

2. Truth: Suffering is optional. So, yes, all these bad things are going to happen to you, but it is entirely up to you how to respond. Suffering is our habitual pattern, the way we’ve trained our mind to respond to pain. It’s the choice we make to wallow in our suffering, indulge our feelings of being a victim, cling to our tragedies and hurts, tell ourselves long and ongoing stories about how horrible everything is for us, obsess about all that is wrong in the world, catalog our complaints, feed our suffering as if it were a treasured pet.

It is absolutely appropriate to notice pain, to do what we can to address the situation (if anything), respond with wisdom and compassion, but then, if we don’t wish to suffer, it is necessary to let it go, not to reject it or push it way, but to open our heart and allow it to dissolve as it will naturally, to float away from us. Once this happens, we can shift our attention to something else, (suffering would require that we continue to dwell on it), we let go and move on. Depending on the pain, this process of noticing, letting go, and shifting attention will take on different forms, require different approaches, take varying lengths of time. Sometimes we can work through the whole process in minutes, other pain will require more, like water wearing away at a rock.

3. Truth: There are three root causes of suffering–ignorance, attachment, and aversion. In Buddhism, these are also referred to as the “three poisons.” Ignorance is actually the starting point for the other two, the center, the hub of all suffering. Ignorance is delusion, confusion, bewilderment, a basic misunderstanding of reality, a confused relationship with ourselves and our feelings and our thoughts and our bodies. Attachment is clinging, passion, greed, grasping for that which we think will please us or make us happy. It’s what George Carlin was referring to when he said, “Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.” And the third poison, aversion, is rejection, aggression, hatred, animosity, dread, dissatisfaction, wanting things to be other than they are.

One Wish: That we all would be free from suffering. You, me, all of us. It’s the wish at the heart center of every other wish I ever make.

Three Truths and One Wish

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cover of my new journal from rifle paper company, reminds me of the wallpaper in my great aunt magdelaine’s bedroom (except that it was pink)

I started this post today with this simple writing prompt: “What do I know to be true right now?”

1. Truth: My house won’t be any cleaner just because I’m on vacation. Oh dear reader, I had such plans to be better, do better–stronger, faster, cleaner. And yet, only a few days in, I’ve decided to let that go. There is nothing magic or special about vacation. There’s still work that needs done and still not enough time to do everything I have planned–and that’s going to have to be okay.

2. Truth: The days aren’t magically longer because I’m on vacation. Another expectation I had about this vacation that I am letting go early on is that somehow the days would stretch out before me like forever. That I would lose track of time in a sense of endless bliss, feeling like years had passed between sunrise and sunset, like the way summer vacation felt when I was a kid. Now don’t get me wrong, I hope to have a few days like that, maybe even a few weeks, but I’m okay if the entire almost three months doesn’t feel that way every minute.

3. Truth: I need to learn to rest and play. At the workshop with Brene’ Brown this weekend, reviewing the guideposts for wholehearted living, the things to cultivate and the things to let go that she writes about in The Gifts of Imperfection, I felt pretty good about most of them. I am clearly still working on “cultivating self-compassion and letting go of perfectionism” and “cultivating calm and stillness and letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle,” but I am making such good progress.

The one place that I need to do some real work is with “cultivating rest and play and letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol.” I’ve mentioned before how now that I’m finally moving, it’s so hard for me to stop–I feel like I’ve already wasted so much time. But, Brene’ reminded us this weekend that if we rush the work, the work won’t be as good as it could be, and that this is a life we are living, we don’t want to rush our way to the end, and we want to enjoy it and contribute something of value so we need to cultivate the things that keep us strong, to “respect our body’s need for renewal.”

One Wish: That we can all soften and lean in to joy, whether we are on vacation or not, wherever we find it. And that we remember we can stop, sleep, rest, even quit if we need to, that there is wisdom in being gentle and kind with ourselves, brilliance in slowing down.