I have been watching the show The Walking Dead. For those of you who have not seen it, it is a zombie apocalypse show: The premise is simple, if you get bitten by a zombie, you turn into a zombie. The show follows the humans who are still left, as they try to navigate a world with more and more Zombie (and fellow human) perils.

This whole season has followed a main plot point: Sofia, one of the children of the group whose stories we are following, has disappeared. Her mom, the fellow adults in the group, all fear the worst – but still with no body to prove her zombification/death, everyone holds out hope and tries to find her. In the final episode of the season, she zombie-walks out of a barn a townsperson has been imprisoning zombies in. From her state of decay, it is clear she has been dead/zombified a long time, possibly the whole time/season her group has searched for her.

As she zombie-walked out of the barn, it had the sudden thought that hope and fear arises in, and exists in us; these are not in the world, and they are not strictly correlated to the actual facts/circumstances of the world.

In the show whenever something looked ‘promising’ there was hope – when her doll was found her mom took it as a sign she was still alive. When a group member found a hideout, that looked recently inhabited, small enough for a kid, they had hope –they came to believe –the kid who had been hiding there was Sofia. Even a flower growing in the field, associated with a native American myth of a lost and found child, was given meaning that Sofia would be found. There was hope.

Whenever signs seemed to point to not finding the girl, there was despair: When the first 72 hrs passed the policeman in the group assumed the worst because that is the police ‘rule’ of when you start looking for a body not a child. When a zombie seemed to be coming from an area the girl might have gone, the group feared it had eaten the girl and gutted it in search of her remains.

The season is a rollercoaster of emotion –fear, hope, fear, hope, fear, hope – and then the big barn reveal, and the realization that all the fear and all the hope didn’t correspond to reality: In fact, the girl had been dead the whole time. The emotions, the meaning read into all the ‘signs’ the group found, didn’t change the reality, it just drove the rollercoaster of emotions. It became clear to me that the whole emotional rollercoaster, even the moments of hope, is actually dukkha.

Us humans cling to hope, we are led to believe it iso great, it, it is what makes even the shittiest situations bearable. Hope is why we are born. I have often reflected that the past is gone, the present flits by so quickly I can’t even cling to it, what I live for is hope of the future. Hope that the story I imagine up for myself – that sail-into the sunset retirement with Eric, 2 homes, travel galore — is coming my way, making all the moving, his crap jobs, the time apart all ‘worth it’.

But when I zoomed-out in this season’s storyline, I thought again about the story of the drug addict Bubbles (blog here): Hope is like the moment he gets high, that hit of drugs, or of imagination, seems so pleasurable for a second, but it is actually poison. Hope drives the cycle of striving, of enduring, of laboring. Hope is how we are reborn. It is how Eric and I tolerate his terrible/ stressful jobs that keep us constantly moving, how my mom, writhing in pain in the hospital, endured for the ‘cure’ on the other side.

Hope seems so sweet, something so other than hopelessness, loss, fear. But as I watched episode after episode of reading tea leaves—group members finding signs to fuel hope, all while also finding signs that fuel despair, it as clear hope is as bad as fear, it is just the high to fear’s low. There is no way to separate the two, and the whole rollercoaster we all ride through our lives is dukkha. The striving for highs in a world in which we can’t separate them from lows is dukkha. The fact that we need hope at all, the belief that things will be ok, be better, in a world that is constant struggle and danger, proves the dukkha nature to the whole thing.

I realized that just like getting high, hope itself arises from hunger. It is the desire that things will go as you want, the desire to get what you want, to avoid what you fear. It is the craving for a particular future. And we already know, hunger is dukkha. Hope gets such a good rap, but it is really a Hallmark of our desperation.

Because of hope, the characters in the show risk their lives, endure injury and pain, to look for Sophia. Hope drives them forward, the way seeking the next fix drives Bubbles.

A long time ago, LP Nut taught about dhamma practice as ‘killing the hope’. When I watched the show, I saw the wisdom there: When we kill hope we kill the suffering of the rollercoaster. We kill the effort. We kill the disappointment when it is crushed. We kill the hunger for one future, one outcome, above others.

In LP Nuts exercise, he talked about how everyone gets sick sometime. He went around a group of people and asked everyone if they had managed to avoid illness: Of course, everyone, be it the cancer survivor or the diabetic, answered with a list of their ails. His teaching was for me — my hypochondria, my fear of illness, it was actually fed by the hope that I could have a different outcome than sickness. That I was somehow the exception. Ironically, I now see killing the hope, not trying to control my body in order to stave off every disease I think is coming for me, is actually the anecdote of fear. With acceptance of the inevitably of sickness, with understanding that its timing and type align to my karma, there is at least the opportunity for equanimity to arise.

I have been thinking a lot about karma these days, it is in the blog chapter I just finished writing. I have been considering how everything that happens, it couldn’t have been any other way. When there is a result, it is the exact manifestation of the exact causes they were in play to give rise to it. I just think it could have been different. I have incomplete views that leave me shocked by outcomes, which if I really saw all the causes in place wouldn’t be shocking at all.

A long time ago, Mae Yo was talking about the practice of female genital mutilation. Mothers would take their daughters to be circumcised. They would tie their ankles to theirs, to spread their legs apart and then a midwife with rusted razor blades would cut the girls’ clitoris off and sew their labias together. On their wedding night, a new husband would cut the girls open. Girls often got infections. Some died. I struggled to understand how any mother that loved their daughters could do this to them.

I was so revolted. It took years actually for me to even begin contemplating this gruesome custom in any meaningful way. I had thought it was just SO WRONG I wouldn’t get anywhere. But as my practice progressed, and I started thinking about how conditions of this world shape us, our choices, our lives, then I started making some progress…

It dawned on me that, considering the circumstances, what else could mothers do really? In a society where women depend on husbands for sustenance and husbands reject wives who aren’t circumcised, isn’t a mother just helping protect her child? It’s a wiggle, a move to keep the girls as safe as they can be within the constraints provided by their culture. By the constraints faced in their actual lives. In the end, this only ‘freedom’ this world affords us.
Because I don’t understand karma, I am indignant when mothers circumcise their children. When seemingly nice John Wicks get beaten, when sick people expose others –me – to their illnesses. When illness threatens me and the body I love, I worry about, I fear falling into (conditioned) states that kill my hopes for a long, happy, healthy life: That pie-in-the-sky, kinda amorphic 2-home-travel-filled-retirment-happily-eever-after-with-Eric.

But just like with my mom, when she came to visit after lockdowns, promising to be super covid cautious and then dancing with a germy toddler…Like all the antimasker, the less than 6-feet gatherers, the antivaxxers…we all have our own reasons, out own education, our own beliefs, our own health profiles and risk profiles and backgrounds and politics and new sources and experiences. There are always reasons that forged the results. But me, I don’t see all the reasons, I ego-centrically believe every reason for everyone and everything is the same as it is for me, and so I struggle to accept things as they are. I have the cray cray belief that not only should things be different, the can be different.

And so, hope is born. Hope I will be different, I can avoid sickness. Sofia will be different, she isn’t subject to death, at least not yet, not when none of the adults in her group could see any reason her time might be up. And with each ‘sign’ I can auger from the tea lives, like finding some flower from Native American mythology, hope is nourished, it swells and grows, independent of the reality of circumstances.

My wrong views, my belief that things can be different then they are, can be in accord with my rules, can be as I hope them to be, can at least be brought to pass with the strength of my supreme effort and willpower, block my acceptance of reality. And so, in ignorance, I fight, fight, work, stress, endure. I normalize dukkha.