Too Many Lives to Count Part 1
In the context of so many lives, none is all that meaningful. And yet I cling…
I have been reading Mae Neecha’s autobiography and her recollections of her own past lives really struck me. From them she is able to reflect on her tendencies and views that keep her coming back, for example returning to the world to ‘fix’ others she judges. She sees the perils of these habits of view so clearly: She talks about a friend staying with a loser husband because she thinks she owes him; even in one life it is clear how her friend’s belief causes her to return to that husband again and again, despite the suffering he causes her. This is what we are all doing over countless lives – returning again and again, despite the suffering it causes us. Rebirth really is the ultimate peril.
I can’t recall my own past lives, but I decided to start thinking just about the many Alanas of my current life: Hippy Alana, Beloved by my Father Alana, Miss High School Goody Popular Alana, Yoga Alana, Hipster Body Building Alana, there was Prove my Worth With Many Lovers Alana, and then Prove my Virtue as Good and Dutiful Wife Alana…In one lifetime I have changed so much, assumed a sequence of identities that are not just changing, but are sometime diametrically opposed to other, older, versions of myself.
And as I further consider all these Alanas, it is pretty clear their identities don’t lie ‘out there’ anywhere. They are in my head. They are my stories, my fantasies, my curations. I start with views about what I value, what it would be ‘good’, useful, desirable to be, or not be. Then I am the choosy narrator, curating particular ‘proof points’, memories, actions, belongings and relationships to help me assume and prove these many alanas.
All the while, I am not even honest with myself about what or who I am: I assign so much value to the image of someone on top and in control of my life, I can’t even control my body aging, I can’t even control my behaviors, growing agitated with my mother, or angry in NY, even while trying to claim myself a virtuous daughter, an equanimous, unflappable Buddhist.
These identities, they are forged by forces of habit, what I value based largely on what I am used to, what has proven useful in the past, what I have been exposed to. It’s really just arbitrary values I have picked up over the course of lives, norms dictated by the norms of the circumstances of my births. And for these identities, that are nothing but passing moments, meaninglessly dictated – by what I am exposed to, what I choose from habit – I work, I suffer, I mourn the loss of. Oh the hours of struggle to get the body shapes I needed for each identity, the time squandered on collecting and caring for objects, outfits, relationships that proved the particular me de jour.
There is a scene in the show The Witcher that hit me so powerfully when I saw it that it has stayed with me for years: A girl, Yeniffer, is abused by her father, forced to live in a pig pen, and yet, when a stranger comes to take her away Yennifer is despondent. As the viewer, we already know this stranger is actually someone who ultimately helps Yennifer find a better life. I have often considered why it is that Yennifer is so reluctant to leave when she has such a shit life.
It’s a shit life, literally, filled with pig shit, but its ‘HERS’ what she is accustomed to. In the end, no one wants to lose what they have, no matter how meager it is. Human tendency is to cling even when letting go may offer us something better. I rather keep trying to be some rotating version of an alana than lose my sense of self, even through those identities, those births keep me mired in a shitty, painful, world.
