Towards ripeness

Discomfort, loss, loving what is important to love

The human realm is more favorable than the lower realms because the suffering is not relentless. Pain alternates with pleasure. In the hungry ghost realm,¹ we want, want, and want, but we never get. In the human realm, we also want much of the time—but sometimes we do get. We succeed just often enough that it seems like we could figure out a way to get what we want all the time. This sets up the predominant mentality of the human realm: we hope to have only pleasure and no pain. We have this constant, naïve wish that we could somehow stop the alternation.….

We spend our time trying to be with people we like and avoiding people we don’t like; trying to be in comfortable, pleasant situations and avoiding uncomfortable, unpleasant ones; trying to hold on to whatever pleasure we have and trying to keep all pain at bay. The thought that keeps running through our mind is “If I could just have [fill in the blank], then I would be happy.” The main klesha we experience is craving. The primary suffering in this realm is that we can’t accept the alternation of pleasure and pain. Instead, we tend to be obsessed with trying to achieve or maintain comfort. — How We Live Is How We Die by Pema Chodron

Discomfort is part of life. There’s a lot of money to be made helping people get rid of their discomfort. In fact, a lot of capitalism’s version of the “Good Life” is the elimination of discomfort. Hence, there is an endless market for eliminating discomfort.

As I wrote two posts, ago, even the financial independence movement promises things similar to wellness industrial complex (indeed consumerism as a whole): do this, you’ll be finally happy. For the FIRE moment: spend below your means and save/invest and you’ll remove the over-work, the constant stress, the empty materialism of capitalism. You’ll get the comfort and joy of travel, time with family, your hobbies.

Which is true.

And yet FIRE won’t make you happy. Because, as Pema Chodron points out, pleasure and pain always exist. Even if you’re financially independent.

A long way to find peace of mind

Craving and aversion are nothing to sniff at because it is not only the superficial wants: money, fame, status. It’s our deepest and most closely held ones too. I have a client who grew up in rural India. Even as a child, he had a dream to come to America and become a CEO. He told me that when he flew on a plane that first time, to go to America, he didn’t even know what a roll of toilet paper was. He eventually achieved that dream of being a CEO. He sold his company and bought a $10 million house for his family. But one of his children suffers from deep depression, including recurring suicidal thoughts. There is no amount of money, no degree of success, and no size of house that can balance the potential loss of a child.

The singer/songwriter Nick Cave’s lost his 15 year son when he fell off a cliff near their family home in England in 2015. In 2022, he lost another son. Cave recently released “Hollywood,” a song that recounts the famous story of Kisa Gotami, where a wealthy woman begs the Buddha to save her dying only son.

Kisa had a baby but the baby died
Goes to the villagers says my baby’s sick
Villagers shake their heads and say to her
Better bury your baby in the forest quick

It’s a long way to find peace of mind, peace of mind
It’s a long way to find peace of mind, peace of mind

Kisa went to the mountain and asked the Buddha
My baby’s sick! Buddha said, don’t cry
Go to each house and collect a mustard seed
But only from a house where no one’s died

Kisa went to each house in the village
My baby’s getting sicker, poor Kisa cried
But Kisa never collected one mustard seed
Because in every house someone had died

Kisa sat down in the old village square
She hugged her baby and  cried and cried
She said everybody is always losing somebody
Then walked into the forest and buried her child

Everybody’s losing someone
Everybody’s losing someone
It’s a long way to find peace of mind, peace of mind
It’s a long way to find peace of mind, peace of mind
And I’m just waiting now for my time to come
And I’m just waiting now for peace to come
For peace to come

Again, it’s not just the superficial stuff, it’s the most important stuff too. And as Kisa Gotami’s mournful story shows, money can’t always prevent the greatest sorrows we have.

It’s a long way to peace of mind. The journey is not comfortable. It’s not following anything on the outside. In fact that’s the wrong direction.

The rumble of terror beneath it all

One of my favorite books is "About Alice," Calvin Trillin's love letter to his deceased wife. In it, he writes:

“She wasn’t among those whose response to tragedy or loss was limited to offering the conventional expressions of sympathy before moving on with their own lives. In 1988, an old friend phoned us to say that his grown daughter, a young woman we’d known since she was a child, had been raped by an intruder. This was a dozen years after Alice had been operated on for lung cancer, and among the things that she wrote to our friend’s daughter was that having lung cancer and being raped were comparable only in that both were what she called “realizations of our worst nightmares.” She said that there was some relief at surviving what you might have thought was not survivable. “No one would ever choose to have cancer or to be raped,” she wrote. “But you don’t get to choose, and it is possible at least to understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like ‘To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything,’ or to begin to understand the line in ‘King Lear’—‘Ripeness is all.’ You might have chosen to become ripe less dramatically or dangerously, but you can still savor ripeness.” Alice had a large envelope in which she kept copies of letters like that—along with copies of some letters she had sent the girls and copies of poems we had written for her on birthdays and documents like the announcement of a prize for community service that Abigail, our older daughter, had been awarded at Yale and an astonishing letter of recommendation that a professor had provided for Sarah, our younger daughter, when she applied for her first job after getting her M.S.W. On the envelope was written ‘Important Stuff.’”

Nothing will protect us from the rumble of terror that underlies everything.

But we will try. The Sufis have a saying: beware of loving what is not good for you. I think so much of our pursuit for happiness:² achievement, spending, vacations, luxuries would be fine, if it weren’t so relentless. But we pursue them addictively; it seems more about avoiding the uncomfortable feelings inside of us. We keep trying to chase the external pleasure and keep the internal pain away. In so doing, we’re running from ourselves. But as Joseph Campbell said, the dark cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

Turn around.

Love what is important to love.

It’s a long way to peace of mind.

The journey leads towards ripeness.

I was born when all I once feared, I could love. — Rabia of Basra

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things —13th-century Buddhist priest Dōgen Zenji

Financial Freedom 1 starts tomorrow

I’m loving my current FF2 cohort! Honest, vulnerable people exploring juicy stuff about their beliefs about wealth and investing. FF1 starts tomorrow. For any of you who haven’t taken it (half of this mailing list are alumni), consider it now or in April! Full schedule of courses here.

1. “In the hungry ghost realm, the beings have grotesque descriptions. Some of them have an enormous empty belly, but their mouth is about the size of a dot and their throat is as thin as a hair. They’re always hungry and can never take in nearly enough food to satisfy them. Traditionally, the emotion this relates to is greed, but Trungpa Rinpoche’s term was “poverty mentality.” This is a feeling of neediness that can never be satisfied. No one ever loves you enough, there’s never enough of anything, you’re always left out. You constantly feel you’re starving. Everything that happens makes you feel deficient, like a loser.” — Pema Chodron Which sounds like a lot like achievement culture and consumer culture and social media culture to me.

2. So cultural ingrained that it’s encoded in our Declaration of Independence.