Appreciation With Great Difficulty

(Originally published on substack. This was unusually scary and vulnerable to publish)

There’s this Buddhist poem. I don’t know if it’s a poem. They say it’s “a set of contemplations.”

It’s called “The Four Reminders,” and the first time I read it, it kicked me to the floor. And every time after, too.

Here’s Trungpa’s translation.

—

Joyful to have
such a human birth.
Difficult to find,
Free and well-favored.

But death is real,
comes without warning.
This body will be a corpse.

Unalterable
are the laws of karma;
cause and effect
cannot be escaped.

Samsara
is an ocean of suffering.
Unendurable,
unbearably intense.

—

When I was first learning coaching, one of my teachers said “An unwanted present state will stay stuck until it’s fully appreciated.”

To appreciate something is not to say “I like this” or “I condone this” or “I value this”. It’s to let it in. Just let it in to your heart. You must let the things into your heart that you’ve excluded. Make space for them in your heart, or they’ll be chains around your ankles.

To fully appreciate the present state, to love the world as it is. To allow the world into you fully, and not keep out parts, not try to keep yourself separate, but let the world belong to you and let yourself belong to the world.

This requires a letting go. A surrender to life, to what will happen. “Amor Fati,” Nietzsche said. “Love your fate.”

Or as Tyler Durden put it “Stop trying to control everything and just let go”

When you do that, you get the benefit of belonging to life. You are just life, living. You are the world and the world is you.

But Goddam it’s a lot to take.

I don’t know war, outside of news, and social media, history books, and Hollywood. And it’s already more than I want to know.

But what if the only way to stop war is to let it into your heart? For each of us to let it into our hearts. Not to love it. But to allow it. To allow it to exist. To not resist*, but include it in your heart, and include your love of peace. To include those two things together is to break your heart.

Things don’t care whether you want them or not.

So we allow war to be. In this moment, when it is, we allow it. We appreciate it. Things are not different than how they are. And when you do that, also feel your love of peace, and the pain of all the suffering war is causing, and your own fear about your suffering and your death and the suffering and death of your loved ones, and remember, your love of peace, your longing for peace.

Just try, right now. Include all that in your heart. Pause. Close your eyes. And feel your love of peace and the fact of war, together in your heart.

It’s too much. I can’t do it. I’m sure I don’t even come close.

But trying just now, I sink down. It’s like lowering myself into a hot bath of vibrating sensation. Or descending from the pristine clouds into the hot, chaotic jungle. I feel now that I belong to the world and my heart cracks, and I want to cry.

And then I can’t stay, and I rise back up, out of that intensity.

But for a moment, I felt I belonged to the world.

Maybe trying this practice with something as huge, horrendous, and abstract as “war” is setting us up to fail. But what happens if you try it with something in your own life? Find that knot, that persistent place where life keeps being the same, painful way. What’s the the thing in your own life that feels hardest to appreciate?

Now again, close your eyes and let it into your heart. It can sit right there along with your desire and longing that it be different. You have to make room in your heart for what is so, as well as your wanting something else. When you do that, and breathe, and feel it all together, as part of the wholeness of life, what happens? What happens in your heart? And what happens in your life? I’d love to know.

Of course, I only get to explore these territories because of how much peace surrounds me. This blessed peace, that allows me to stop and feel life in this way. This precious peace, this delicate, sometimes punctured, peace, that I pray remains, that I pray grows stronger. I pray that you are surrounded by this peace too, and all the people you love, and all the ones they love and so on, out across the whole world.

—

* This is not to say real world actions are unnecessary. I’m not talking about quietism. You can include a rabid dog in your heart, even as you’re putting it down.