Painless One

These past few days have seen me return to some of my old tricks. When given time to myself, I turn on the television, or I turn on the computer and read through endless inane stories, or I start to flip through the celebrity magazines. Anything that shuts off my mind. I have been doing well during the past week and a half about my jogging, though I have to fight the temptation to run through the mathematics and realize that my current 12-minute per mile pace means I'm more than twice as slow as I was twenty years ago. Marathoners when they're hitting the wall run faster than I do right now.

And that's the difficulty. I know that my slow plodding does me good; I don't mind the creakiness I feel when I first get going, and even the soreness feels good. But it seems that where ever I turn, I come face to face with the years I've lost diddling my time and my life away when I could have been working, writing, dreaming, acting in the world. Sometimes, I'd rather to anything than think about that.

I've enjoyed, on the whole, getting older, but the pain of wasted time sometimes rushes at me so suddenly that I have to throw something--anything--in its path: a reality TV show, a box of Carr's Wheatmeal Biscuits, a film on Turner Classic Movies, a spin on the internet, endless games of Minesweeper. You see the irony here; to stave off the pain of the time I've lost, I waste more. I cover over sadness with what will surely lead to more sadness. It's called, I think, addiction.

I have known some people who specialize in one or two addictions. And some people, of course, are much more intense and more destructive than others. I don't mean to trivialize those who become so enmeshed in drug or alcohol use, or sex or gambling or work or shopping, that they send their lives spinning into an abyss; I have seen that in far too intimate a way not to recognize the difference in degree that is from my diversions. But in one way or another, so many of us seem to me in flight from the reality that to live is to experience loss and suffering.

That all life is suffering is the first of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths. And Carl Jung said that "All neurosis is the substitute for legitimate suffering." We don't need to go in search of it; we don't need to inflict it on ourselves. The sheer act of living gives us opportunities enough. Maybe the angst of adolescence is nothing more than facing the emotionally wrenching truth that the fantasies of childhood have ended. And even for someone like me, who had an unhappy childhood and prayed for it to end, losing the vision and perspective of childhood hurts.

My culture tells me that whenever I feel suffering, something has gone wrong. I must have made a bad decision in my relationships or my professional life; I don't have enough money; I'm not living the right lifestyle; I'm not eating the right foods or buying the right products; I'm voting for the wrong politicians or worshipping in the wrong religion. If I would only correct my life, the commercials and billboards and self-help-personal-power gurus tell me, I won't ever have to suffer again.

But I'm convinced that life equals change, and change means loss as well as gain. Life, in short, hurts. But the capacity to undergo suffering also contains the capacity to feel joy. I think that's what Jung was talking about. I can't kill one capacity without killing the other, without deadening myself to reality and life. The same callus that interposes itself between me and pain also makes it impossible for me to feel the touch of those I love.