Contentment
A large chunk of spiritual practice is geared to helping us love the lives we are living. This can seem a puzzling challenge when you consider that most of the time life doesn’t turn out as we had hoped and planned for. It takes a big shift in perspective and lot of practice to “love the life you’re with” – to paraphrase that old song.
I used to wish that my life looked different. That the plans I made worked out the way I had hoped for. That life got easier, and in that ease, I would find lasting happiness as if happiness was something solid that you could store away and draw on into infinity as needed. I looked outside of myself to find happiness since this is what I was taught by this culture and in my family but continued to come up short. Most of the time I wanted some other life although I did not see it this way. When life didn’t turn out as I had hoped – a rejection letter, lost job, an illness, or heartbreak – I inevitably felt like a failure and worse shame for having failed. Sometimes it just seemed like bad luck.
It was in the exploration of the kleshas (afflictions) in yoga philosophy that I began to see how much of my life revolved around grasping for happiness (ragas) and pushing away pain (dveshsa). It might seem that this is actually a good way to live. Who would ever choose pain over pleasure? The difficulty is that we rarely have choice over what will befall us in life. And we can’t know in the short-run what will emerge out of the joy or the pain. How pain or joy shapes our lives will unfold over our lives. No story is ever complete. Magnificent poems will be written but may emerge only after a thousand other frail ones end up in the scrap heap. The pain involved with training and running a marathon may give way to elation at a goal reached. The tender connection and love of a child will wax and wane as they necessarily grow in ways that cannot be predicted. Life will be more surprising than we could have imagined.
I recently met a woman who had the kind of life that I dreamed of when I was younger. While the particulars aren’t important – you can fill in your own blanks – I had thought that that hers was the life that would bring lasting happiness. This life I see now existed only as a fantasy. Her life was threaded through with the same kinds of loss and pain as my own. Her life as my own was not immune to suffering as no life is.
Through practice, I see more clearly how in longing for another life I am committing a kind of violence on myself, my soul, and the ancestors who have brought me into being. I see my connection to a larger picture and the ways in which my own soul’s calling – the most intimate parts of me – have been called forth and beautifully shaped by the entirety of my life, the pleasures and the pains, joys and sorrows. In my heart and hands, I see the sewing my grandmother did in the tenement house where she lived with her mother dropping out of school after eighth grade to make ends meet. The grandfather who left Italy starving in the hull of a steamer for a new life in America. The father who lost his mother when he was still a child his heart stitched forever with the anxiety from this loss, the mother who married at 19 given no other choices for her life. My grandmother’s hands, my grandfather’s faith, my father’s anxiety, my mother’s push against confinements flow through my blood and bones in the make-up of me along with my stories, thresholds, horizons. It could not be otherwise. A life worth loving.
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