Quality

“Or if he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with – and they are all, sooner or later, dull – and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him, because his Quality decisions change him too.”

~Robert M. Pirsig
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Then It Hit Me (NYC Handbill art circa 2003)

“Let the good times be where you are!”

This was the message inside a birthday card I got when I was 13.  Cheesy, sure, but just the right thing to say to a teenager who, like most teenagers, was always worried about what others were doing and whether he was missing out.  It slowly sunk in over the years, resulting in a calmness and “centering” from which most good things tend to spring.  The “here”.

It strikes me that much unhappiness results from allowing the mind to be somewhere other than where you are.  You worry about what they’re saying about you (colleagues, customers, friends) or if there’s a happier, richer, sexier, greener-grass life for you somewhere else.

Even more unhappiness seems to result from allowing the mind be someTIME other than WHEN you are, as opposed to the “now”.  You dwell on bad (or good) moments from years ago, or you worry that you’ll lose your job or never have enough to retire or never achieve your dreams.  “It isn’t the burdens of today that drive men made, but rather the regret over yesterday and the fear of tomorrow.” (Robert J. Hastings)

I don’t mean to oversimplify.  Certainly, if you’re being tortured, or if you’ve just been shot in the face with birdshot from a hunting rifle, you won’t be considering the present to be the gift that Master Oogway claims it is in Kung Fu Panda.

But, in general, if we can extricate our minds from other places and other times, we might be pleasantly surprised.

Patience

Ten years' searching in
   the deep forest
Today great laughter at
   the edge of the lake.

~Soen Nakagawa

All’s well that ends well?

Why this infatuation with endings? We can witness or experience the greatest life or love in the history of the world, yet if it ends badly it is somehow sad or tragic.

Nothing lasts. If there is bliss at the beginning, or in the middle, does tragedy at the end undo it?

Perhaps, indeed, “the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep.”  (Kenny Rogers, The Gambler)

Hold on to the center

Happiness is too often measured on the margin.

There is no yellow Ace

Scared money cant win and a worried man cant love.

~Cormac McCarthy, from All the Pretty Horses

No HPS required

There is no way to happiness.  Happiness is the way.

~Buddha

Everything old is new again

The secret to eternal wonderment is to release our tight grip on what we think we know, to look at all of the familiar old faces, the worn surroundings and predictable vistas, and see that they are as utterly unique as the moment we first encountered them, that they are not fully captured by our mental categorizations and ersatz memories.  (Though if you start getting lost on your way to the shower, you may have gone too far.)

“The map is not the territory.”  Look up and see, not the “mountain,” but the mountain.

Passionate ambivalence

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

~T.S. Eliot, from Ash Wednesday