Alana's Dharma Blog

I was watching a show called The Witcher. In it, there is a powerful sorceress, but she is young, untrained, her family doesn’t see her potential and they abuse her, force her to sleep and eat out in the pig pen. One day, another magician sees the girl and recognizes her potential. This magician goes to the girl’s family and offers them a few cents to buy her and take her away. The father accepts the offer. The young sorceress, named Yennifer, cries and cries at being taken away. Incidentally, years later, thanks to the training of the magician who bought her, Yennifer becomes a rich, beautiful and powerful sorceress, heir to a life seemingly much better than what she had left behind in the pig pen.

The scene of her crying, it struck me so hard – why wouldn’t she want to leave such a shit show life? I couldn’t identify any reason other than that it was ‘hers’. It was all she knew, it was who she considered herself to be. In her mind, it was a foundation of the future she imagined.

No matter how pathetic, painful and meager her life was, she clung to it. Am I doing the same? By clinging so tightly to who I am, to the story I want to write, I accept dukka, I grow content to just have a little less of it, rather than leave a dukka world. Leaving means giving up what I have, who I am.

There is this bias of clinging to what we have. I did it when we left Texas, even though in the end I loved California so much more. I did it when I left California, and I ended up hating NY so much more. But I still ask myself how much of my hate was just resistance to something new, to the loss of what I had identified with before. Did my much beloved California, my SF identity, set me up for NY suffering? And was NY really so bad? Anyway, even if it was, life has moved on, there are new places, new imaginary futures I cling to now.

I consider this lake house we are staying in now: I rented it just a few months ago to solve a problem — my own house was evicting me with chemicals and toxins from the construction project across the street. This house was an emergency solution (there it is again, always solving a problem), a temporary arrangement. But just having it, enjoying it for this moment, and suddenly I am clamoring for more. Willing to suffer, to take on a burden, the stress of a purchase, for more. Why the fuck can’t I just be here now and enjoy the enjoyable parts?

I already have the data on this after all, the future is not what I think it will be: I wanted longer in Miami, and I got it after my mom’s accident forced me back, but it was so stressful, the house was uncomfortable, the weather too hot, Eric testy. I so looked forward to coming home, to enjoying the comforts of my apartment for a little while before we moved, only it was literally making me sick, it was the source of tremendous stress –not the imagined relief –to figure out what to do and where to go. I imagined bad outcomes, needing to find a new place so quickly, and ended-up at this lovely lake house. I was in Manhattan, enjoying it, and realized that when we had moved there I had been so excited about it till we arrived and it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t San Fran, didn’t feed my SF identity, so I ended up hating it, making myself miserable, massively adjusting (“fixing”) my life in response. Why — because I couldn’t just accept it for what it was, I had to imagine what it made me.

Like Miami, or Greenwich, or NY, I imagine what it would be like to have the lake house. I can’t just be, I have to imagine, and with imagining there is clinging, and with clinging there is so much suffering. Why not just enjoy what is enjoyable and suffer what is sufferable without worrying how to cling to what is enjoyable, which will inevitably change, or try to avoid what is undesirable, when those circumstances too are bound to change. Clinging (both to what we want and to the hope of escape for what we prefer to avoid) is the bearer of burden, the enemy of equanimity, and yet I seem ceaselessly addicted to it.

The craziest part is, when I really think about the stuff I used to cling to, the things, like Yennifer and her childhood home, I didn’t want to part with, now I don’t care. Sometimes I even feel better off without them: I clung to SF, I’m over it. Clung to the old Houston house, feel lucky at the better life I was afforded because we left and Eric went to Google. Clung to the apt in the Miami, but I have moved on to a better house. Won’t I feel the same about a lake house? Won’t I feel the same about this body and this life? It is so serious, so stressful, while I cling to the things I will inevitably loose. And then I move on, clinging and stressing over new things. New glitzes that glamour me into accepting, clinging to, what hurts me.