Elizabeth Rosenberg

Well, the apartment is too small for me to work in the “studio” (a.k.a. second bedroom) while the boy-child is home on his winter break. So that means I’ve got plenty of time for reading, hand-work, beading, knitting, crochet and thinking. Ah, thinking. Sometimes a less-than-pleasant activity, thinking deeply can be more like cleaning the bathroom than imagining a visit to the Bahamas. In that vein, my friend Lynn (who has no blog, so I can’t link to her) recommended that I read a book by Pema Chodron titled When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.  So, I took it out of the library.

I’ve been enjoying it slowly, reading a little bit every night. That’s very different from the way I usually read, which is actually a lot more like devouring than reading — I’m a fast, fast reader. But this book is so full of good and practical advice that it makes me want to slow down and savour every chapter. I mentioned to Lynn the other day that I’d begun reading it, and she asked me if I was enjoying it. I told her, truthfully, that I was, mostly because even though the author is a Buddhist nun, and I had been expecting lots of existential buddhist-y stuff, what I found instead was lots of practical advice that I could easily apply to my everyday life. Good stuff.

Last night I read chapter ten, in which the author discusses the three truths of our existence: impermanence, suffering and egolessness. She writes that these three truths should be celebrated. It was my very favorite chapter so far. First, impermanence. Whoa, that’s a loaded one. Nobody likes to think about the fact that we’re not permanent. The very fact that we are human means that each of us will have an end. And really, who wants to celebrate that? This is what Pema Chodron has to say about it:

People have no respect for impermanence. We take no delight in it; in fact, we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We try to resist it by making things that will last–forever, we say–things that we don’t have to wash, things that we don’t have to iron. Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

I find it so comforting, in a weird sort of way, to realize that nothing we make is going to last forever. It takes a lot of the angst out of it for me, in a way I can’t really explain.

The second truth discussed in the chapter is suffering. In her writing about suffering, the author says:

Inspiration and wretchedness are inseparable. We always want to get rid of misery rather than see how it works together with joy. The point isn’t to cultivate one thing as opposed to another, but to relate properly to where we are. With only inspiration, we become arrogant. With only wretchedness, we lose our vision. Feeling inspired cheers us up, makes us realize how vast and wonderful our world is. Feeling wretched humbles us. The gloriousness of our inspiration connects us with the sacredness of the world. But when the tables are turned and we feel wretched, that softens us up. . . . It becomes the ground for understanding others.

I loved this! It makes so much sense to me that arrogance is the end result of too much inspiration with not enough pain to go along with it. I have to try to remember that the next time a piece I’m working on causes me so much pain.