“Change always comes bearing gifts.”
~ Price Pritchett
This past week, I’ve had the opportunity to contemplate lots of changes, for myself and many of my friends and family. Be it loss of jobs, relationships, illness …. We all experience on-going change. And many times, change can be of an unwanted nature and challenging to handle. Knowing that we have to come to terms with it, doesn’t make it any easier.
Life can bring dramatic changes in only a period of minutes. Over the weekend, my cat Gabby became ill. She was fine on Friday, but today, she can hardly lift her head, and we have no idea what is wrong. She needs to head into the vet first thing this morning. I think sometimes, watching another in pain can be even more painful than when we are hurting ourselves. We can feel helpless, in addition to feeling grief.
One friend asked: When change is unwanted, what can we do to accept it, until we get to a place of “new norm”?
Change is the focal point for Buddhist insight. Buddha himself is quoted: “Everything changes, nothing remains without change.”
And I am grateful for my friend’s question, for I learned something very valuable for myself. I allowed her question to continually drop into my walking meditation while I cleaned my house yesterday. As I watched my mind go to work to answer this question of how to handle change, I noticed that I too began to suffer. What finally struck me, is that we both began focusing on “the new norm” and wanting to find an answer on how to get there with the least amount of grief.
I have listened to many Zencasts on Dukkha …. The First Noble Truth offered by the Buddha: Life contains suffering.
Some suffering is huge, like death. Some suffering can be very subtle, like the discomfort that arises from being impatient when we stand in line. Andrea Fella notes that we spend most of our lives trying to control things. Changing this to get that. Then getting that, and being unhappy there too. There is never an end to this “new norm”.
This recognition is huge! While only time will heal the short term discomfort we may be feeling at the loss of something we love, developing an understanding of impermanence will help us more skillfully navigate the ever changing world with greater awareness and dignity.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes, in his article, “All About Change”:
Insight into change teaches us to embrace our experiences without clinging to them — to get the most out of them in the present moment by fully appreciating their intensity, in full knowledge that we will soon have to let them go to embrace whatever comes next.
Insight into change teaches us hope. Because change is built into the nature of things, nothing is inherently fixed, not even our own identity. No matter how bad the situation, anything is possible. We can do whatever we want to do, create whatever world we want to live in, and become whatever we want to be.
The first of these interpretations offers wisdom on how to consume the pleasures of immediate, personal experience when you’d rather they not change; the second, on how to produce change when you want it.
Although sometimes presented as complementary insights, these interpretations contain a practical conflict: If experiences are so fleeting and changeable, are they worth the effort needed to produce them? How can we find genuine hope in the prospect of positive change if we can’t fully rest in the results when they arrive? Aren’t we just setting ourselves up for disappointment? Or is this just one of the unavoidable paradoxes of life?
In answering these profound questions, Buddha notes that the effort that goes into the production of happiness is worthwhile only if the processes of change can be skillfully managed to arrive at a happiness resistant to change. Otherwise, we’re life-long prisoners in a forced-labor camp, compelled to keep on producing pleasurable experiences to assuage our hunger, and yet finding them so empty of any real essence that they can never leave us full.
These realizations are implicit in the question that, according to the Buddha, lies at the beginning of insight:
“What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term well-being and happiness?”
So I’ll leave you with this question today.
What I’ve written is only a summary of a very thought provoking article on finding true and lasting happiness.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/change.html
In the meantime, if you are suffering, know that my prayers and thoughts are with you. There is little more that we can offer each of our fellow travelers navigating the ever changing road called life, other than a compassionate ear and a warm heart. ❤
