Buddhism & Life: facing it

This is partly in response to a conversation with a friend about her life these days. It’s about times in life when we come to ask fairly large questions about ourselves, our paths, our relationships, and so on. It’s probably a lot like a mid-life crisis – only I tend to see it in people much, much younger – in their 20s or 3os. That’s probably a sign that they’re a bit quicker than the poor sobs who wait ’till their 45 to start asking questions.

But when a life question comes up, as it will do for everyone (you, me, Donald Trump, and the Dalai Lama), we have two choices:

1. Avoid it (become an ‘x’-aholic, a sports fanatic, and wait for it to go away), or
2. Face it.

People who prefer the first option sound something like this, “when I’m working all the time things are ok, it’s just when I start to think about life that things suck.” This is a tragic outlook on life, made more tragic by how prevalent it is in our society.

In Buddhism there’s the story of the potter who’s working away,
happy as can be (or at least not unhappy), making jars and vases and what not, one after another. He didn’t sell many, but did well enough to get by. One day someone came by and said, ‘hey, you’re [potter’s] wheel is lopsided and it has made all your jars and vases lopsided too.’ The potter got pretty angry and frustrated, maybe even a bit depressed. He was doing fine, but now what? He could stop his work and fix the wheel, which would take some work, but lead to making straight jars and beautiful vases, or he could avoid it and just get by with the lumpy ones.

We need to fix the wheel. There are a million answers to the question ‘how?’ – and I don’t know that any one of them is necessarily better than all others. In life what is needed is less a map and more a compass. There are no predetermined destinations or universal landmarks here, but as long as our ‘life compass’ points toward ‘more genuine caring for other people’ then we’re going the right way.