Several weeks after I had closed-out my exchange with Mae Neecha I went back to review our Line chat and see if I could squeeze any more wisdom juice out of it. I saw the following exchange:

A: I still think I can use my cute yellow purse to convince people of my awesomeness even if I don’t really control the bag itself.  Actually, I think I can convince some people some of the time. But that is enough…

MN: If its only true some of the time, then is it true?

And then it hit me…

Everything that is true in this world ( lowercase true not universally true i.e 3 conditions) is true some of the time.

I have been stuck thinking that because the yellow purse makes some folks think I’m awesome some of the time it proves something special about me. It proves I am a master of the universe, albeit in some limited and temporary way.

But, even stuff I think of as super true and widely accepted is still only sometimes true. My family and I all thought my Dad dying was bad. If we could undo we would. But does the person who got his job after he died think his death was bad? Bad was true, some of the time ( or in this case for some subset of folks).

If some of the time/in some ways/ for some people is a truth about the world, it doesn’t actually prove anything special about me. At most, I am a factor in buying the purse, a factor wearing it, a factor putting myself in an environment with folks likely to share my view it is cool, a factor in selling the message as part of a wider package( wardrobe, facial expressions, word choice, etc.) such that in any given case some folks might see purse and think awesome Alana for some moment in time. But I was never the cause. The cause is in impermanence/ two sidedness. So sometimes can’t be taken as evidence that I am avoiding the rules of the world some of the time. It isn’t evidence that with more effort/time/ tries I am going to finally succeed in making this world my bitch. It is evidence that my ‘success’ is just one, temporary, possibility of the world.

Actually, I can take the opposite perspective and see all the times my stuff proves I am not awesome/ special and master of perpetually arranging Rupa as I desire( i.e. this world is not my bitch): example– I think my apartment in SF proves I can control my life and arrange it as I want it to be, where I want to be. But, the only reason I have that apartment is my old SF life that I loved so much is gone. I chose to leave and ended up miserable. So how can the tool I am using to allay some of that misery and loss (not even all of it) prove I am master of my life and universe?

So I guess the simple answer to Mae Neecha’s question is that if something is true some of the time, it is not true some of the time. Which is actually proof that impermanence is the real master of this universe, not me. Just need more evidence…

 

A note from present day Alana — writing this now I see an additional angle that I missed so here are a few more thoughts on the ridiculousness of using a ‘sometimes success’ to prove a permanent Awesome Alana…Spoiler alert, the endeavor is built on a foundation spoiled at the core by a wrong view.

Over the summer, back when my contemplation were fast and furious (that is the period this ‘Interruption’ series is covering) I kept getting stuck on the fear that because of my practice I was going to loose something important to me — my life with Eric. I was looking at a picture and I realized that my ‘life with Eric’ was an idea, a film reel in my head of he and I driving, top down, along the California coast, listening to music, holding hands and laughing. It was a compilation of several trips, several memories we had together. As I laid in bed in Connecticut I realized that the life that I am so afraid of losing is already gone. The car is sold, the towns we drove through fire ravished, the joke we laughed at long ago forgotten. My fear of ‘loosing’ began to ebb as I understood that what I clung to was just a memory of the past and a hope for a future that looks the same way. What I came to understand is that the particulars of the past can never ever be the same in the future; causes, conditions and circumstances are continually changing.

The exercise of using a purse to prove Awesome Alana, even just some of the time, suffers a fundamental flaw at the root — what I believe ‘proves’ awesomeness now is based on what I perceived to have worked in proving awesomeness in the past. The problem (which is clear in my imagined life with Eric) is that the future arises from different causes than any instance in the past and yet I expect exactly the same results. This is why there are never any guarantees about what the future holds.

Circumstances are always changing, arrangements in the past can’t ever be the exact arrangement again..and yet that is what I depend on to defend my notion of my identity. Alana is built on an already shifting, crumbling, changing foundation and yet I expect her to be steady state.