The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [75]
I got in the car and drove to San Francisco in a daze—a daze I may never recover from.
Our first response to loss, difficulty, or pain is not surrendering to what has happened. It seems so negative, so wrong, and we don’t want to give in to it. Yet we can’t help thinking and feeling differently, and it is the thinking and the feeling—so unpleasant and painful—that is the real cause of our suffering. These days many of us experience troubled thinking and feeling because times are tough. So many are losing jobs, savings, homes, expectations. And if we are not losing these things ourselves, we are receiving at close range the suffering of others who are losing them, and we are reading and hearing about all this in the media and on the Web, which daily depict the effects of economic anxiety all over the world. We are all breathing in the atmosphere of fear and loss.
In one of our last conversations, Alan shared with me an odd and funny teaching about death. He had a sense of humor, and his spiritual teachings were often odd and funny, sometimes even ridiculous, which made their profundity all the more pungent. This teaching involved his fountain pen collection, which was extensive, and worth a lot of money. He had sold several thousand dollars’ worth of pens to a man he’d contacted online. Before payment was mailed, the man, some years younger than Alan, suddenly died. Since there was no good record of the transaction, the attorney who was handling the estate for the widow said he would not pay. Alan could have hired his own attorney to recover the money, but it wasn’t worth the trouble and expense, so he ate the loss. “But I didn’t mind,” he said, “because I learned something that I should have known and thought I knew but actually I didn’t know: when you’re dead you can’t do anything.” He told me this with great earnestness. As if it had actually never occurred to him before that when you’re dead you can’t do anything anymore.
In a memorial retreat we held a few days after Alan’s death, a retreat full of love and sorrow, I repeated this story. I said that since Alan was now dead and couldn’t do anything, we would now have to do something because we were still alive. What that something was, I didn’t know. I only knew that somehow, in the face of a great loss, one does something different than one would otherwise have done. So this is what I learned (with Alan’s help) about the meaning of loss: that love rushes into the absence that is loss, and that love brings inspired action. If we are able to give ourselves to the loss, to move toward it rather than away in an effort to escape or deny or distract or obscure, our wounded hearts become full, and out of that fullness we will do things differently and we will do different things.
The Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa talks about a soft spot, a raw spot, a wounded spot on the body or in the heart. A spot that is painful and sore. A spot that may emerge in the face of a loss. We hate such spots, so we try to prevent them. And if we can’t prevent them we try to cover them up, so we won’t absentmindedly rub them or pour hot or cold water on them. A sore spot is no fun. Yet it is valuable. Trungpa Rinpoche calls the sore spot embryonic compassion, potential compassion. Our loss, our wound, is precious to us because it can wake us up to love, and to loving action.
When sudden loss or trouble occurs, we feel shock and bewilderment, as I did when Alan died. We wonder: what just happened? For so long we expected things to be as they have been, had taken this as much for granted as the air we breathe. And suddenly it is not so. Maybe tomorrow,