Karen sent me a link to this piece in the NY Times called "Reprieve" - I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Of course as Buddhists we know that you can be happy all the time if you practice, and that you don't need to have your life threatened to appreciate What Matters.
excerpts:
"Fourteen years ago I was stabbed in the throat. ... The point is that after my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.
...
I’m not claiming I was continuously euphoric the whole time; it’s just that, during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The sort of horrible thing that I’d always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters away from this one (the distance between the stiletto and my carotid), I had been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach. Everything in this one, as far as I was concerned, was gravy.
...
I wish I could recommend this experience to everyone. It’s a cliché that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like roller coasters to suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping. The catch is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent hit man to assassinate you.
It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, sort of the same way some of us only appreciate our girlfriends after they’re exes. ... "
In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."
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I just recently saw the movie 'Hannah and Her Sisters', I hadn't seen it in years. Such a great Woody Allen movie. Woody is having a spiritual/midlife crisis in the movie and when it gets really grim he tries to kill himself with a rifle he had bought. Of course it is a foiled attempt because he is sweating so much and has moved the barrel from his head and he accidentally pulls the trigger. After that he comes to his senses realizing that maybe he doesn't need to know the meaning of life and all the answers, maybe everything is just okay, that life has enough to offer in it's ups and downs... it's worth living.
ReplyDeleteanyway, thanks for your inspiring blog, I think of you everyday in my prayers.
miss you,
Lynn