It’s Like This. Something’s Wrong!

One of my online friends has recently had quintuple bypass surgery, and is still in the hospital. What struck me particularly was that she strolled out of her house one recent morning to have breakfast with friends, and will never return home or see her beloved cats again: She went from breakfast to the hospital, and will go from there to a different state entirely, to live with relatives not far from where her daughter lives.

While she is in the hospital, her son has had to pack up all her stuff for shipping, trying to figure out what she would want to keep or not, and find a home for her cats.

What a major, and entirely unexpected, change. Since such things don’t happen all the time, it can come to seem as if they’re not supposed to—as if there were such a thing as supposed to or not supposed to, or should or shouldn’t. I recall Howie asking us one night if, when things were going badly or we felt upset, we said to ourselves, “It’s like this,” expressing equanimity, or if we said, “Something’s wrong!”

One fellow said, making people laugh, that he says to himself, “It’s like this. Something’s wrong!”

Insight meditation (vipassana) refers specifically to insight into some aspect of one of these three characteristics of existence: impermanence, suffering, and no-self. The latter means that if we pay attention, we will discern thoughts, feelings, smells, sounds, sights, and tastes, and nothing more. The self is something we make up by saying “I” all the time.

Until Eugene’s class a couple of weeks ago, I never realized that I think of only two of those things—impermanence and no-self—as simply being the way things are, while I think of the third, suffering, as something that doesn’t belong.

But it does belong. It, too, is just part of the way things are (until ultimate liberation is reached, which I am not expecting in this lifetime).

By suffering, I mean getting what you don’t want and not getting what you do want, from tiny things all the way up to having to go from breakfast to the hospital for a quintuple bypass, or having that happen to your mother.

The problem, though, isn’t in the events but in our attitudes about them. If I could see having quintuple-bypass surgery as no more or less desirable than sitting in my comfy chair eating Barbara’s Original Cheese Puffs, I would be happy all the time, or at least serene, which might be even better.

If I could see having my apartment filled with lighter fluid fumes as equivalent to not, ditto.

(I can't.)

Our online group has been in touch with our friend’s daughter a bit, and I have also been reading both our friend’s and her daughter’s blogs, and have been very impressed at the daughter’s positive attitude, and how she seeks to find the good even during this frightening, stressful experience.

I have other friends facing very serious health situations, even possible fatal diagnoses, and so am feeling very grateful that today, at least, I can rise from my bed and wash the dishes and listen to Audioslave. I am alive and, as far as I know, perfectly well. This is great!

Last weekend I went to buy fabric at Stonemountain & Daughter in Berkeley. I couldn’t find anything I really liked for pants, except for plain green cloth, of course, but bought a few things I hoped might grow on me, plus some pretty cloth for various uses in my apartment.

However, I’m now considering tossing out the cloth I’m not crazy about, or taking it to the thrift store, and waiting until something turns up that I really like. I know: after the apocalypse, when there’s no cloth, I’ll say, “Darn it, I wish I had back those two and three-quarters yards of the reddish cloth with the snail-like design that made my eyes feel like they were vibrating slightly.”

Maybe pants that make people’s eyes feel like they’re twitching could be an asset if I ever have to do any high-level negotiations, though having pants like that probably makes it more likely that I never will have to do that.

I have lately seen My Beautiful Laundrette, in which Daniel Day-Lewis is just darling, and makes an extremely convincing gay man. In fact, there is more chemistry in his scenes with the Pakistani fellow than I have seen in any of his romantic scenes with women.

I also saw The Night Porter, in which Dirk Bogarde plays Max, a former Nazi concentration camp guard, and a young Charlotte Rampling plays a woman who is sexually brutalized by Max while imprisoned. Years later, they meet again and resume their relationship, which ends in tragedy after not too long. Dirk Bogarde (a gay man in real life) was wonderful. I will now append his movies of the same era to my Netflix queue.