Alana's Dharma Blog

Some dear friends had come to visit and I planned a day out for them, and their 2 kids ages 2 and 4, to the zoo. Its about an hour drive from my place to the zoo and in the car both kids fell asleep. My friend, looked back at the 2 sleeping tots and exhaled deeply, with a sigh of relief, admitting she was overjoyed just to have a few minutes of ‘adult time’ to herself. The truth is, I got it, they had been visiting almost a week and, at least while I had been around, there was almost no break from the kids screaming, running, hungry, crying, fighting, disobeying or needing some sort of attention.  I thought to myself, “this is so why I don’t want kids.”

This friend however was one of those women that ALWAYS wanted kids. I have known her since high school and there was no doubt in her mind, even when we were just kids ourselves, that having kids were a key ingredient to life’s success. She had the first one easily enough, but with the second there were issues; there were doctors and drugs and painful procedures. Her husband wanted to quit trying, said they should be happy with the one little boy they had, but she was adamant  — she had always dreamed of 2 kids and she would do whatever it took to have the second. Eventually of course, her wish came true, and now it seemed to me she had a new wish, a few more moments of ‘adult time’ before those little terrors woke-up.

The truth is, this isn’t the first time I have seen this friend struggle with the kiddos; more than once she has admitted she misses our nights out, travel, more intimacies with her husband, a go-go-high powered career, and all the other freedoms and aims she felt she needed to give up when the kids came along. She is always quick to tell me how much she loves her kids though, that of course they are worth it, they have given her life a new sense of meaning and purpose.  I smile, nod, listen supportively, but I always get the vague sense that this might be what Stockholm syndrome is like — somehow victim/hostage has come to love her captors.

I have no kids, so I like to pat myself on the back for being immune to such a life trap, but if I really reflect on it, am I? Of course, my husband, Eric, comes to mind — I love him so much, as my friend does her kids, but look at how much I have had to sacrifice for him. I live in a place I don’t like, forced by his job to leave a city, friends, and a life I loved. Not for the first time either, 3 times now I have moved from my home to follow my husband across the country. Its not just were I live, it is what I do and how I spend my time that I have compromised on as well. Eric is a homebody, so while I used to love being out and about, I have modified my behaviors for him. I wanted to be a lawyer, got into some of the country’s best schools, but my husband already had a high-power consulting job at the time and we decided two high power jobs in one family would be too much of a strain on our relationship, so I declined law school. Frankly everything from my diet to my décor has been a compromise, a negotiation between the royal ‘we’, rather than an independent decision. None of this is to say I am unhappy with my life, I have adapted, adjusted myself to achieve my higher priority, the non-negotiable part of my own vision-of-an-ideal-life I have had since I was a kid –a healthy marriage.  I have aligned my hopes and expectations to be comfortable with the reality of my life. These are my choices, and yet…

And yet, when I look at my friend in the car, hungry for just a few moments of rest, I see her suffering –suffering she has invited with her choices and tradeoffs — suffering she has become blind to. Aren’t I blind to my own suffering as well? Its a bit shocking that we humans can delude ourselves, come to see what traps us as who we are and what we want. But the truth is, we all love our captors: We love ourselves, we are enamored with the world, we cling and strive to what we have and what we hope for. We are tethered and bound, and yet somehow, we close our eyes tight, click our heels together 3 times, and convince ourselves that there is no life better than the one we have or the one we long for. Sure it is hard, sure we suffer, sure we know there are tradeoffs, but its worth it right? Right? Its totally worth it…it has to be. Right?

I walked into Starbucks today and there was a homeless man making a mess at his table near the door, I felt myself move to give him wide berth, going to stand as far from his table as I possibly could while still holding my place in line. The truth is, the man, his rupa (physical form), disgusted me — the smell of filth mixed with urine, the look of his matted hair and scabby skin, his behavior of strewing the table and floor with torn sugar packages, crumpled newspaper, making no effort to keep his surroundings in the restaurant clean.

As I try to place physical distance between that man and myself, I realize I was trying to place emotional distance between the two of us as well.  I so desperately need to believe that that man –with his filth, poverty, inconsiderate behavior — that is not me, that is something deeply ‘other’ to what I am. But, the more I consider it, the more undeniable it is that in many ways, that man and I are more alike than different.

Fundamentally, it is that man’s rupa that sets me off, that jolts my deep sense of unease, that my heart uses to ‘prove’ our deep difference. But isn’t that all surface rupa I am fixating on? More fundamentally, don’t he and I share the same genesis and the same disintegration of our rupa:  We are, after all, both formed from the union of sperm and egg, both gestated in in the wombs of our mothers, born to spend some finite period of time in this world before both our bodies disintegrate back into the very same dust of the earth.

After he and I are both  dead and gone, will someone be able to pick up a fragment of bone or a spec of dust that was former flesh and be able to say, “oh this one was that Alana chick, but that little scrap nail or hair over there, that one was the homeless dude from Starbucks.” Of course not, because that man and I have fundamentally the same rupa, the same organs, hair, eyes, skin, arms, legs and head; our bodies –and the composites upon which they are built — are basically the same. His body wears down, I look down at a busted thumb joint, feel the dull ache of a nerve issue in my arms, hear the creaking in my hip, and I can tell you my body is wearing down too. He is dirty, but I am just a few showers away from being exactly as dirty as he is. I am in line at Starbucks –why? Because I need food and drink to live, same as he does, sipping on his beverage. He closes his eyes and sleeps at regular intervals, I am freshly awake from my own last sleep.

In my mind I focus on our differences specifically so I don’t need to grapple with our sameness, a sameness that scares me.  I don’t want to feel the same as someone I see as dirty and disgusting and, frankly, a failure at life in our society. I don’t want to contemplate on how my body can reach the same state, or my life could take a similar turn. So I focus on the superficial physical difference that I use to gauge his ‘fundamental constitutional difference’ (ie. the personality traits and tendencies that made him homeless in the first place).

But isn’t this mental exercise of mine –to seek difference in the face of overwhelming, albeit uncomfortable, sameness — is about as meaningful as fixating on the subtle differences in the shape of each snowflake and ignoring the fact it is all snow: Derived from water when it reaches conditions below 32 Degrees and subject to melting back into water when it reaches temps above 32 degrees. No one shoveling the driveway gives a damn about which flake is pointy and which flake is round-tipped, they are just happy salt seems to help with them all.

Really we are the same. Physically we are indubitably more alike than different. And one thing my practice has really started showing me is that what can be seen in the physical world is often mirrored in the intangible one. After all, impermanence rules it all. My luck, my fortunes, my safety net, my behaviors, all these things (denominated in rupa btw) can change. They will change. Shit, they already have changed — most recently, my move to NY making me feel low, loosing the status, identity and social circle that kept me feeling happy and safe in SF. If I can loose, be brought low, why do I assume I am safe from going lower? If an Alana can go from an SF high to a NY lower why should I believe my self exempt from a homeless lower still?

In a world of inseparable pairs — where wealth and poverty, status and infamy — come together, cycling through states of both is inevitable.  My life hinges on the 8 worldly conditions, just the same as that homeless man’s. I reap the fruits of my causes, just the same as that homeless man. Both of us subject to our ever-evolving-karma. The only difference between that man and I is it is his turn to be low and my turn to be high. Time will change that as it changes everything else, just as surly as snow starts to melt at 33 degrees.

• When my old employee left my organization I got called to help again and ultimately took my job back. I had trained up this employee to replace me, I had planed she would stay, but precisely because things went differently than I had planed I was able to regain a position I enjoy.
• When Eric and I started dating I had no plans for along-term relationship, I thought it would be a short summer affair. Turns out we have been happily married for over a decade
• I had brought powder sunscreen on my trip to Africa and it was insufficient, I was burning everyday. Out of nowhere another couple, on their last day of vacation, gave me their high SPF cream and I was able to avoid getting badly burnt.
• My stepdad had no plans for a check-up, but after an accident he had an MRI and it caught lung cancer at an early, operative, stage.