The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [78]
You will see that regardless of your conditions you can participate in what matters most. You will see that in the big picture of things, you have what you need and there is plenty to be grateful for—and plenty to do based on this gratitude. You may not have as many impressive appointments to keep as you did when you were busy with your high-powered job. But you have more time to keep up with friends and family—to call and say hello, how did your day go, happy birthday, happy anniversary, happy holiday, and oh yes, I love you and am glad you are in my life.
You may not be able to afford the fancy gourmet meal or the person who comes in to clean the house, but you can prepare with great care some steamed greens with olive oil and lemon and find someone you love to eat it with, and clean up the house yourself, noticing, maybe for the first time, how good the workmanship is on this dining room chair as you dust and polish its legs. Living more slowly and simply—although this may not be what you wanted or expected—may not turn out to be so bad after all.
My own personal reference point for material happiness is a memory I have of my days at the Tassajara Zen monastery, where I lived for five years when I was young. Tassajara is in a narrow mountain canyon that can get pretty cold in the winter months, when very little sun gets in. Our rooms in those days were unheated, so the cold really mattered.
I remember winter mornings standing at a certain spot in the center of the compound, where the first rays of the day’s warm sunlight would come. So far, no material luxury I have encountered surpasses this, and I feel it again every time I feel the sun’s warmth. Hard times are painful, and no rational person would ever think to intentionally bring them on. Quite the contrary, ordinary human day-to-day life is mostly about trying to avoid the financial, health, romantic, and psychological disasters that seem to be lurking around every corner. So we do not valorize or seek out what is hard or unpleasant. Yet disasters are inevitable in a human lifetime, and it is highly impractical not to welcome them when they come.
Hard times remind us of what’s important, what’s basic, beautiful, and worthwhile, about being alive. The worst of times bring out the best in us. Abundance and an excess of success and good fortune inevitably bring complications and elaborations that fill our lives with more discrimination and choice. We like this, and seek it, but the truth is it reduces joy. We are less appreciative of what we have. Our critical capacities grow very acute, and we are always somewhat skeptical of whatever excellence we are currently enjoying, ready to reject it in a moment, as soon as something we recognize as superior comes along, whether it’s a new phone or a new spouse. When there’s less, there’s more appreciation, more openness to wonder and joy, more capacity to soften critical judgment and simply celebrate what happens to be there, even if it is not the best—even if it is not so good. It is, and there’s a virtue merely in that. The sun in the morning and the moon at night.
I remember my good friend Gil, like Alan also gone now, who went to India to relieve the misery of poverty-stricken villagers by offering them the expert eye care he had been so well trained to deliver. He was shocked to gradually realize that these destitute, ill-schooled villagers were happier and wiser than he and his prosperous, well-educated friends in San Francisco. This is when Gil began his spiritual practice.
In retrospect we can see that the last fifty years or so of ever-increasing prosperity and opportunity have been based on an enthusiastic, exuberant, and naive lust for material goods—as if the goods themselves,