Hardcore Zen
You canât live in paradiseâ but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.
You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. This is not logical but it is often true.
My mistake was that while I could see money and fame werenât going to make everything right, I still believed that there was some situation where everything would be just perfect forever. By setting my sights on something truly bizarre I was no doubt trying to ensure that my dream remained forever out of reach. You read a lot these days about âfear of success â and people deliberately sabotaging their own lives in order to keep their dreams from being realized. Maybe itâs not that people like this fear success so much as they fear discovering that success really isnât success at all.
When you look at things from an idealistic viewpoint everything sucks, as The Descendents said in the song called âEverything Sucksâ (from the album Everything Sucks). Nothing can possibly live up to the ideals and fantasies youâve created. So we suffer because things are not the way we think they ought to be. Rather than face what really is, we prefer to retreat and compare what weâre living through with the way we think it oughta be. Suffering comes from the comparison between the two.
It was all very ordinary and normal. But in that very normality and ordinariness was something more wonderful than anything special I could ever have imagined. All imagination pales into nothing compared to what your real life is right here and right now. Thereâs not a single dream you can have, no matter how pure or beautiful, thatâs better than what youâre living through right now no matter how lousy you think right now is.
You may be busy with work and family and responsibilities and all that, I sure am, but Iâll bet you also waste a hell of a lot of time every day. You devote hours and hours each week to ârelaxingâin ways that arenât relaxing in the least. You kill time. You steal a nap. You screw off. If you were bound and gagged inside a wooden barrel just about to head over Niagara Falls, youâd pray for just one minute more to live. And yet, while youâre alive, what do you do? You get bored. You wish to be elsewhere. You wish to get whatever youâre doing now over with. You want to speed by those boring minutes like your life is a video where you can fast-forward through the commercials. When the end comes youâll be wishing you could have back all those boring moments you zipped through. But you killed them. Dead and gone. Try putting some of that time to good use and see what happens.
You donât need to do a damned thing to experience such joy either. You donât need to snort an ounce of coke, get a turkey-baster full of hot grease shoved up your ass, blow up the Washington Monument, win the Indy 500, or walk on the moon. You donât need to go hang-gliding over the Himalayas, or kayaking down the Amazon. You donât need to screw that oh-so-willing babe with the dark hair and the pouty lips or the smokinâseventeen-year-old on your brotherâs baseball team, and you donât need to party all night with the beautiful people. You donât need to do any of that stuff to know what it means to be alive. Youâre alive when youâre sitting in your bedroom cleaning wax out of your ears. Youâre alive when youâre looking at your turds floating in the toilet and noticing bits of last nightâs dinner in there. Youâre alive when youâre at the supermarket wondering whether to go for the Hostess ÂŽ Ho-Hos ⢠or the Little Debbies ÂŽ. Youâre alive right now. Just be what you are, where you are. Thatâs the most magical thing there is. The life youâre living right now has joys even God could never know.