The problem with every day life
I spent a good deal of my day on Friday speaking to a friend about the flip side of the coin. Sort of seeking the tragic optimism that Frankl writes about in his Man’s Search for Meaning – of seeing meaning in the tragic. A few years ago I had asked a friend who had been raped what she had come to find as a way of explaining it all to herself and she said, “Nothing, it shouldn’t have happened.”
I stayed after meditation to go over the Genjo Koan at the Zen Center. And in going over the words over and over, I saw the dilemma there, or here.
Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread.
Not because you are attached the blossoms fall, but even when you are attached they do, and even when you don’t look weeds grow. And so it is that I read this whole treatise with curiosity, a sense of a ha, a sense of uh huh, and a large dose of whatyagonnado?
I’m trying to see myself embodying nonattachment. I’m trying to visualize myself in a world where when a tree falls on your garden, you don’t dwell on it and find your meaning there. I’m trying to take steps away from the quagmire I found myself in, the one that clings to my feet as I try to step out, the one that obscures my heart.
I was in my driveway yesterday looking at some of the weeds that poked through – the marble rocks are blinding in the sunlight. A dear friend walked by with an out of town guest in tow, he looked a little awkward at my blinding bald head and the only thing he could muster was, “Are you wearing sunscreen,” as he hurried away his guest. I’m trying to wear my baldness with a little less weight.
When loved ones or friends say, “You look beautiful bald,” I nod. Beauty comes from within. I want to shout at Tatjana, how would you feel if you suddenly gained 60 pounds? Not beautiful, I bet. That’s how it feels to lose your mane (although an old friend told me the other day, “No one ever liked you for your hair, Rachel”) and your job, your energy and all those things that gave meaning to you, your sexuality, your personhood. “We’re here because we love you, Rachel, not your job, or your hair, or anything but you,” a good friend told me the other day at my table. I’m trying to wear my baldness with a little less weight, a little more positive meaning.
Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach.