A Pain in the Neck

My contacts have been bothering me so I had my eyes dilated for a free Lasik consultation at the end of the workday last Monday. I emerged blinking uncomfortably into the sunlight and decided that since I couldn’t really see anyway, I would look inwards and go to a Monday night Dharma Punx talk with Josh Korda at Maha Rose.

It was an emotional week, as it’s been a year since I found out I’d always have cancer.

I had been feeling a little philosophical as well. As part of my apartment rearranging project, I’d moved a bookcase and had taken all my books out. As I arranged my books by existentialists on one shelf, my black cat wedged himself into the empty shelf below and I thought about how pleased my 17- to 22-year-old self would be with that tableau. That’s the shelf that I would present to people if I wanted to posture as an intellectual and hide everything else I’ve ever read.

I put Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha on that shelf and thought about how I didn’t remember anything about it except that it dealt with Buddha and I’d read a good portion of it in 1997 while driving to Cleveland from Columbus and traffic was stopped on the highway for a fatal accident. Word filtered back as we emerged from our cars. Before cell phones, I actually walked to the nearby rest stop and made a pay phone call to my mom and grandma so they wouldn’t worry. When I finally arrived, Princess Diana had died. It was a strange day.

Earlier last Monday, I’d read an article that popped up in my news feed about “The simple art of not being miserable,” and it was about Hesse’s Siddhartha. I’m now convinced internet algorithms can read your mind. The two friends in the book who sought the meaning of life and happiness had asked the wrong questions. Essentially, it seems, it was about eliminating expectations and not always focusing on what you think might make you happy. The constant longing for something makes you miserable.

The talk that night, called “The Fear of Insignificance, Transcendence and the Final Process in Buddhism,” mentioned the French existentialists, and I felt it brought me full circle. It dealt with dukkha, or suffering, and there are three types of suffering. The bad news is I suffer from all three. (Would my inner goth be pleased?) The first type is physical suffering, like my cancer and my contacts issue. The second type is a suffering that comes from a loss of security, like a loss of something we grasped onto going away. It’s the pain of something coming to an end; the example he gave was the closing of a favorite restaurant. (How I’ve mourned the loss of favorite places! I even wrote a column about it years ago for the magazine I worked for. I had no idea that there was a Sanskrit word for it.)

The last one is Sankhara dukkha, which is the pain of trying to find meaning and trying to distill temporary human experiences into something that gives them meaning (selfies, etc.). Oh, no! I thought. As if I don’t already try to grasp onto temporary things, I’m always trying to assign meaning too! And taking Instagram photos! I’ve also been very much Enthusiastic Parker from Friends, trying to take mental snapshots before I get sick again. He also spoke about how we try to take lessons away from painful situations so we never have to feel that way again. Korda recalled overhearing a man telling a friend of a recent breakup, “That’ll teach me for dating a Canadian.”

Everyone laughed. We’ve all done that though. In this recent breakup, I’ve thought I need to take a lesson away.

He also mentioned what existentialists call the pain of  life slipping through our fingers: angst. That’s one of the reasons I love the existentialists so much. They understand my angst and are so much more eloquent about it.

He also talked about how we should live in the moment and I immediately started thinking about my feet falling asleep because of peripheral neuropathy and he says we shouldn’t get caught up in thinking ahead. So I started thinking ahead to this post.

Korda said a lot of other important things and you should listen to his talk. I kept bumping into people and I had a hard time being in the moment. I got a better seat this time but my neuropathy was acting up, and I somehow managed to get a slippery meditation cushion. How do you fall off something on the floor?

I had a better experience being in the moment at yoga this weekend, except for the very end of today’s class when, during savasana, the teacher did the thing where they give your shoulders a mini massage and pull on your head in a nice way. She lingered for a second and I wondered if she was doing some sort of reiki or meditation, but then she whispered, “The back of your earring came off. It’s next to your mat.” My earring did the same thing yesterday and I thought it was funny, and then my mind wandered to the bottle of sparkling wine and the macarons I had in my yoga bag to take to a friend’s place after class, and the present moment seemed less appealing than the future, which held wine and macarons.

I try to be in the moment, but as a daydreamer, it’s tough.

Someone posted on social media last week about karma. She said, “Karma, hurry up and do your thing please.” I have often thought that as well, maybe more often since this last election. Fairness is so important to me, and things often don’t seem fair. Things aren’t fair. Sometimes you can do what you can to right things, like vote.

Sometimes you can’t, and you wait for some kind of cosmic justice. That doesn’t always happen.

Sometimes, people try to steal your joy. When that happens, I try to remember that they are miserable and whatever is causing them to be a jerk is a deep unhappiness that won’t be solved when they are mean to you. That person is being mean because they are deeply unhappy.

It’s deeply unsatisfying though. More satisfying would be seeing someone smote.

A few weeks ago, I went to a book reading in DUMBO near the Brooklyn Bridge and a stranger next to me started talking to me. I barely said much in return. Out of nowhere he told me that when someone is a jerk to remember, “Don’t take it personally. They were a jerk before they met you.” Wise words, I suppose.