Have you ever wanted something so badly that it drove you insane? My children regularly seem to be this incline toward screen time. Some people are addicted to drugs or food or sex, even in an abusive and predatory way as seen by what is happening in the news. Some lust after power or wealth.
But you can also want a family or a house so badly, or romantic love or career. There is also the thirst for freedom, equality and justice.
Recently I have had the mad desire for distraction. For bread and circus. For excitement.
And through that desire I ha e alsi had other yearnings, I suppose for adventure, for the plot if a movie or novel. The truth is I believe mist peoole yearn afterbthis oft not named thing. It positive like freedom, but not negative like power.
The thirst of the mercenary, the Han Solo or Indiana Jones who yes, maybe searching for wealth or a treasure, but its really the plot and struggles along the way that enrapture tha audience.
My mind has painfully been attacking itself and my body over the need for such a yearning that seems so simple, so easy, and yet alsi impossible. I meditate and during that time I am calm, and I realize I have always had some version of this yearning. Always, since childhood, but of course it would manifest itself in different activities, movements, people, or things.
Like the Buddhist lessons of impermanence though, once attained, that thing or status or person changes. The Buddha talks about this desire as being the origin of true suffering. A friend and teacher of sorts has told me the belief that the only person that can truly love you the way you need us yourself. And the Buddha made that argument that in order to even live others you must love yourself.
And that to conquer the mind within, may sound simple, but is no small feat. Learning and reading this sort of thing in school it all seemed so simple. After all when you are young you are full of potential and any hardship has the potential to change into the origin story of a great story with massive changes. But as you settle in towards the end of the movie and realize there may be no plot twist a great painful fear settles in.
The fear that this is it, that everything is perfect. I realized in highschool that I may fear heaven more than purgatory as Heaven was as permanent as hell and it is the permanence that is to be feared.
And yet it is permanence we seek. The illusions of permanence that we seek after. The ledge, the mountain top that is IT. That we have made it. That we have reached our potential.
I used to think Marc Antony a fool. But all the fools of the past and present have recently been proven to me to be wise people misrepresented by the feeble and ignorant, who in their own way are also wise people misrepresented by othersbstuck in different cages and boxes of feebleness and ignorance.
In any case that thirst for an in permanent thing can driven the mind insane indeed. But what to Do? Poetry painting meditation. Ambition of other sorts....one cannot force fate. Or perhaps there are more malleable ways of achieving a goal through the shifting of perspective.
To love oneself properly...
Perhaps even more difficult than loving thy enemy or neighbor.
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