A good friend of mine had a brother who had become seriously ill. The truth is, it was a long standing disease — slow progression at first, but suddenly much more severe. It looked increasingly like his death was imminent.  All my friend wanted to do was to help, to find some cure, to put forth effort, to do something, anything, to make her brother better. Her efforts however were fruitless and my friend was inconsolable. Still, I tried to console her. All I wanted to do was to help, find some cure, to do something, anything to make her feel better. My efforts however were fruitless.

One day I was sitting and talking to my friend about her troubled life, her anguish over her brother, and it dawned on me that her brother is suffering, my friend is suffering, I am suffering — there is nothing special, nothing exceptional about any of us. Everyone suffers. Suddenly,  a story from the Buddha’s time popped into my head, it was the tale of Kisagotami (click here to see a short animated video of the story): In brief it is about a woman whose child dies. Devastated, she goes looking for a ‘cure’ and her cure quest ultimately leads her to the Buddha. The Buddha, in his super awesome wisdom, tells the woman (paraphrased here), ” No bigs, I got this, all you need to do is bring me 3 mustard seeds and I can cure your son. One small detail though, the mustard seeds have to come from a house that hasn’t experienced any death”. Off she goes, hunting for mustard seeds. House after house, she inquires, everyone has seeds, but they have all also experienced death in their homes. Finally she sees the truth — there is no family free of loss in this world, no person free from death, this is the mighty truth of impermanence. And so, the Buddhist version of “happily ever after” ultimately ensues and she achieves a level of enlightenment. I shared the story with my friend, but even as I spoke it felt like hollow comfort, it soothed neither her nor I.

Later that night, out of nowhere, I realized there is  wisdom in the Kisagotami story I had never understood before –  when it comes to death, disease, loss, suffering there is nothing broken, so there is nothing to fix. My friend’s brothers illness, the loss of my SF life, the noise, the dirt, the differences in NY that I find so irksome, these things are normal, they don’t reflect a broken wold, nothing has gone amiss. At their root, they are part of the nature of this world–suffering and impermanence. The only thing broken is me, continually believing I can ‘game the system’, solve ‘the problem’ figure out ‘the fix’ that lets me and my loved ones live a a suffering-free, impermanence-free life forever.