If we're tossing out solutions, or potential ones, for our troubled souls, all I have is this.
I spent six months living in a zen monastery after a particularly devastating breakup that left me practically homeless. I'm an orphan with no family and so when my world fell apart I had no place to go, but the friends I had been practicing meditation with took me in, and I lived there and cooked and cleaned and did odd chores as "practice" while I engaged in other, more formal meditative practices and tried to put my broken self back together again.
I can't say there was never anyone more broken than I was at that moment, but I have certainly never been in a more difficult place. And this was all AFTER I had put myself back together from an absolutely wretched year of full-blown PTSD hyper-vigilance due to a trauma-triggering event that dragged me through the mud for an extended period of time. So I was already well familiar with what it felt like to be a major basket-case. And then the big betrayal happened.
I won't bore you with additional details on all that. I've been through a lot, let's just say. But the most interesting juxtaposition I've ever experienced was that of being in this profound place of peace and tranquility while living through the murderous rage of betrayal and the abject fear of not knowing what I was going to do next, or how I was going to survive.
I spent six months there, working on acceptance and forgiveness. The zen master gave me her robes to mend by hand as a practice, and I decided to infuse each stitch with a prayer for the well-being of those who had betrayed me. It was calming to think I was sending positive juju out into the universe after all I'd been through, but I am still not sure if I ever meant a single one of those prayers. Yet the act of doing something positive did have a soothing quality to it, and helped me to accept my reality which, in turn, helped to draw me out of my brooding self-pity and into a better and less-fractured state of mind.
There were other troubled people who came there and they needed help, and I did what I could to help them. I cooked and cleaned and led meditation services and otherwise worked to fit in, but I never really fit in, because the whole point of zen practice is to break you so that you see the world differently, and I was already broken. I knew I couldn't accept the teacher's offer to send me to seminary to study and become a master myself.
So after six months I managed to scrape together enough to embark on a new adventure and I packed up the small number of belongings i had and drove across the country to start over with an offer from a friend out here of a place to stay and a job.
So things fall apart, and sometimes the only thing you can do is accept that things are what they are, but know that you can still be a complete mess and be a positive force in the world for someone else. You don't even have to be better off than they are. For me, accepting that things are as they are and the only one with the power to change things for me is me has been the key to getting through these difficult circumstances. But sometimes the best choices aren't the easy or obvious ones.
I'm at a similar place now, though I'm not the one falling apart at the moment. There's a piece of me that wants to flee again, but the piece of me that's been through all of this knows that I'm not going to do that. The universe has seen fit to lift me out of poverty, both financial and spiritual, and bring me to a place where I have all that I need, but I remain saddled with all the stress of someone else's instability. Every day I have to remind myself that I can accept the responsibility that comes along with that. It is not easy, but it will make me a kinder and more patient person.
Though I'll still never be one to suffer fools gladly, but that is another subject. If life has taught me anything, it's that people will lie to you for the silliest of reasons and the thing I can trust the most is that most people can't really be trusted. I can try to do better than that. Sometimes I even succeed.
But there are at least two sides to every story, and many facets to every person. None of us has a blueprint for how we best walk through this life. I've made tons of stupid mistakes, am still making them, and likely will always make them, but the question I always ask myself is how I'm going to feel about the choices I've made when I'm nearing my last breath. There's plenty I won't feel great about, but overall I'm satisfied right now that I can look back and say that I did about as well as any flawed bag of blood and bones might have done.
But these are serious matters — the old ticker goes out to our fellow sufferers.
