Alana's Dharma Blog

Having recently signed a 1 year-long contract to consult with my old company, I got to thinking how strange it is to have a deadline to my commitment. For 9 years, I had worked at the same company as a regular employee, but somehow, now, having a time-specified contract, felt different. It got me to start considering how fixed my view of commitment is in general.  I mean sure, I had left jobs, ended assignments and called off relationships in the past. And yet, right up till the last, I had always had a sense of permanence around those things in my heart. Like if you do, you do for life, unless there is a damn good reason otherwise.

It was then that my mind turned to the 8 precepts. Or, more specifically the issue that gnawed at me every year at retreat…everyone else seemed to be taking the precepts, all my friends, all the people I look up to and think ‘good Buddhist’, but I didn’t want to. In fact, even considering taking the precepts made me feel like a fraud. I take commitments seriously, I wont make one till I  believe I can do it totally. Till I feel it is honest. For me it seemed honest, in part at least, equaled forever.

I felt like I wasn’t ready to ordain. I like my lay life, I don’t want to commit myself wholly and completely to my practice to the exclusion of that life. If I commit to the whole precept thing, it should be something I am ready to make permeant, or at least something my heart can accept at any time.

But, to be a bit elementary here — is a permanent view a right view? Really, life is filled with short term commitments. Contracts. Things we agree to, for a time, and then move past. If I am really being honest, isn’t everything in life that way? The idea that I can’t carve out a few days for precepts just because I am not willing to do it for life seems a bit specious.

Of course, there is that second, deeper, issue beneath the nagging feeling, something I wasn’t actually able to overcome, and take the precepts, until quite a few years after this original contemplation (2020 actually): The symbol of wearing white scared me, I didn’t want to need to be so careful with my actions, I feared I couldn’t avoid stains or sins, and I feared everyone could see both in/0n me. I didn’t want to dress the part when I am not the part.

I felt a fraud not just because I couldn’t commit my life to ordination, but because I did not feel like a ‘good Buddhist’, like the kind of person who deserved to be allowed to take the precepts.  I am vain, I am stubborn, I speak harshly, fight with folks I care about, create discord at work, I drink, I swear, I am selfish, wasteful and greedy. I assure anyone reading this post that I am not a perfect person. I am not what I imagine (for what my imagination is worth) a perfect Buddhist to be. But sometime after my contemplations in the 2019 retreat , I began to have confidence in my practice, to clearly see the path and to know that I am on it– if that is not the definition of a Buddhist, I am not sure what is.  I also started training my mind to consider cause and effect more carefully. It was only then that I fully understood the deep flaw in my reasoning: I had cause and effect completely reversed.  My logic was that if I don’t have the effect (ie being a perfectly refined in body speech and mind) I am unworthy of the cause of such an effect (walking the path to becoming enlightened, including taking precepts as I see fit). Putting the cart before the horse isn’t likely to get anyone where they  want to go quickly…

Back when I was a teenager, I refused to wear control top pantyhose when I had to go to an event, I felt like sporting the slimming-squishing-tummy-effect was fraudulent somehow. It was a cheat, not my body. I felt like because the effect was temporary, I shouldn’t try and pass it off as mine. That is the first time I can clearly remember the use of ‘the formula’ in my life: temporary = not mine.

Fast-forward 30ish years: I was in the Uber coming from SFO on my first work trip back to San Francisco. I was scheduled to be around for a few weeks. Back when I used to live in SF, leaving the airport felt like coming home. But now, that same trip felt like a prelude to something temporary. As I crawled into bed that night, I looked around the room — white sheets, white walls, white furniture — everything felt so impersonal, so different than my old, colorful Victorian home that sat, filled with a new owner and a new owner’s stuff, just a few miles away. Here, everything around me seemed to shout, “temporary, not yours.”

Of course, I had noticed this equation (temporary = not mine) before. When I would travel I knew the hotel rooms, the airbnbs, the villas, the apartments,  were all not mine. I knew, without a doubt that I checked-in, used the space for a time, and would check back out again. No matter how nice, or how crappy, the place was, I never got attached. I knew I would leave soon. It was temporary and therefore not mine.

I remember a particular road trip — 5 days driving from Orlando, along the Florida coast, till I got to Miami to visit my family. Eric and I decided to rent a fancy car, a little Corvette convertible,  for our trip. Pulling into a service station, the folks next to us rolled down heir window and shouted ,”Nice Ride!” With my mouth, I thanked them, but in my head a little voice refused the compliment, it said, “5 day road trip, temporary rental, not mine” and the compliment failed to puff my ego at all. Of course, had it been MY PORSCHE, I’m sure I would have felt differently.

When I lived in San Francisco, I was so sure the city was mine. The house was mine. The job was mine. The life was mine. But here I am, back again, and suddenly it is clear that they were all temporary. My time living in the city was temporary. My visit back is temporary too. The only difference is duration.  Actually, the real difference is the way my mind chooses to interpret duration.

But, if impermanence is the master of this world, then the real truth is that everything is temporary. If everything is temporary, what can really be mine? How long will I continue to fool myself with the flimsy, arbitrary, justification of duration?