For months, I’ve been unhappy with my situation.
It started out as a few little annoyances here and there. Everyday concerns, doubts, and worries. Small disagreements.
But before I knew it, these little flakes of issues had rolled into a gigantic snowball of hardened absolutist facts that seemed too heavy and obvious to question or ignore. “Things are not good”. “I cannot do X”. “There are things in life that just can’t be changed or helped.”
Thankfully, thought, I’d learned this wonderful tool called meditation. Do you know it? It’s specially designed to help relief stress and tension from living in our fucked up modern world.
Just stick in your headphones, put on a guided meditation, and sit back and watch as all your troubles melt away.
At least, for a few moments, until you get your next hit or go to your kundalini yoga class or breathwork session or ecstatic dance workshop or cacao ceremony.
Meditation and such spiritual practices have worked wonders for me. They’ve gotten me through my roughest times and helped me grow in ways I could’ve never imagined.
But there’s a big difference between meditating to work on yourself or to help recover from a chronic illness, and using meditation as a way to feel better while the whole world and everything around you is erupting into flames and being reduced to ash.
So, eventually, I realized meditating my problems away wasn’t working. Fuck.
Something else needed to happen.
Clearly the situation wasn’t going to change. Things were shit. I knew that.
It seemed there was only one other thing I could do: pull out my trusty move that always works in times of such difficulty:
Run away.
You know you’re screwed when you’re justifying your tendency to run away with: “No, it’s my moral obligation in this exact moment to go and help my poor dad who I haven’t had a good relationship with for years fix his roof”. Or, “I just need to go on another writing retreat—it’s something we creatives just need to do, look it up”.
The more sophisticated and seemingly well-intentioned the reason, the better.
It makes the perfect mask for running away, to others and yourself, because it’s difficult to call BS on and hold a counterargument against.
Of course, you know what you’re doing.
You don’t really believe you’re being the hero or are a suffering creative or are fulfilling the role in whatever story has captivated your imagination this time.
As soon as I could walk, I was pushing people out of the way and heading for the door. When I started playing rugby at the age of 6, I would get the ball and run in the opposite direction from the other players and my team. As soon as I was old enough to leave home and I could artificially extend the ability of my legs, I flew far away to the Peruvian Andes and happily never stopped moving for years under the proudly self-appointed ‘lifestyle’ or guise of “digital nomad”.
When that got tiring, I decided to settle down and thought I’d grown out of the need to escape from life. No more running away for me. I mean, if now I’m mature and I’ve committed to staying in one place, where is there to run to?
Ha. Ha.
Modern life is designed so that you never have to stop running from your problems.
At least when you physically run away, you actually see other things moving away from you. When you mentally run away from things, you can be all the while sitting at the table surrounded by all your loved ones and, although they appear to be close, you can be on another planet or in another universe.
Yeah, you’re fleshy meat sack is there, but your little mental feet have been getting in their 10,000 steps so much that you barely know where you are, who you are, and certainly not how to get back.
Of course, I’m talking in part about phones. But they’re just the tip of the iceberg. The crème de la crème. The most obvious and the most advanced and exemplary physical manifestation of a phenomena that is innately human and absolutely everywhere in modern society:
Running away and escaping from pain, problems, and difficulty and thus, real life.
Given the slightest chance, humans will gladly run away and avoid pain, discomfort, and difficulty. Given an iPhone 38 with unlimited data and Netflix and UberEats and an infinite library of self-care practices and teachings that promise to get rid of all your problems, humans will run and never stop running…
This is exactly what keeps the endless cycle or wheel of suffering known as samsara going around and around and around.
Life is riddled with pain, illness, discomfort, inconveniences, ugliness, disappointments, uncertainty, and insecurity. This shittiness is hard to deal with. Fact. It leaves a certain dissatisfactory, or shitty, taste in our mouths that makes us inclined to try to fight, avoid, deny, ignore, run away and hide in the more pleasant, fantastical, and sexy sides of life.
Living in modern society, we’re made to think that it’s the shittiness of life that is the cause of our suffering.
And lo and behold, completely coincidently, the driving force of modern society is to reduce and even eliminate the shittiness of life.
That’s what it excels at. But in doing so, it also reinforces and celebrates harmful patterns, convincing us that we and life are inherently flawed and happiness is something to be achieved, gained, bought, and desperately held on to.
Imagine if that happiness generator suddenly went away and we realized things were just fine and dandy as they are: who would use all the phones, who would buy all the fancy things, who would want for a bigger, better car, who would use the shithole of Facebook or Tiktok, who would use/need/want anything?
Unlike what we’re made to believe, it’s patterns or kleshas that make the wheel of suffering go around, not shittiness or dukkha.
In other words, it’s the avoidant and evasive behaviors we engage in to try and get away from life’s shittiness that cause our suffering, not shittiness itself.
In other other words, it’s wise and skillful behaviors, actions, and choices that hold the key to finding freedom from suffering, not escaping difficulty using the latest device designed to help us do so.
This is hard to see when you’re the equivalent (like me) of an ultra-marathon runner when it comes to escaping your problems.
The more you run from life’s problems, the more they appear all around you, the harder it is to stop, and the more you need to justify your actions and keep running.
Modern society isn’t to blame for my tendency to waddle away from mean people or grab the ball and run in the opposite direction from the game.
But, as the wheel of suffering demonstrates how it’s our actions that cause our suffering and can thus lead us to freedom, finding another way to face life’s shittiness is my responsibility and completely within my capacity to do so.
The Five Remembrances are a subtle and gentle reminder of the facts of life and the incredible power we all have to escape the endless cycle of escape in an instant.
They remind us that it’s our nature to get sick, grow old, and die, and that everyone and everything we love and hold dear will eventually disappear.
And then, in the fifth remembrance, they get a bit lighter and remind us of the exact thing we strip ourselves of with each click and scroll and purchase: that nothing belongs to us but our actions. Our actions are all we ever have.
Life is shitty at times. That’s not going to change. In knowing this and not constantly engaging in actions that try and deny or change this fact, you can find true freedom.
The Five Remembrances are called as such for a reason. They’re easy to forget, especially in the society we live in. I’d still forget if they were plastered to my forehead.
But what a relief to remember that shittiness isn’t a sign things are unrepairable and that you don’t need to win the lottery or keep running away for everything to be okay.
Instead, you can do something in this very moment: you can choose your actions.
And each time you do, although you’re guaranteed to fuck up sometimes, you become a bit wiser, a bit more compassionate, a bit more understanding of your nature, and a bit more in touch with this beautiful and mysterious catastrophe we call life.
Or, at the very least, you save yourself the cost of another plane ticket or phony writing retreat.
Hugs,
Joe