From time to time, I print out useful and touching articles from the internet to be read and then kept for future readings. Today, I reread an article I printed out years ago.
It's about a woman who buried her husband only to find out that he had been cheating on her all these while. Her grief took on a new shape and yet, she still yearned for the husband that she thought she had while anger was hanging over her like a dark cloud. There was to be no closure, no confrontation, no explanation, no hacking it out, no way to hold her husband or let him go.
She went on a 10-day silent retreat after that, where participants do nothing but meditate and stay silent throughout. Everything that they felt, they were released and thought about in their own silent minds.
A lot of people pursue happiness in the form of short term fixes. a night-out with their friends, a joint, a holiday, a new handbag, delicious cheese cake, etc. None of those things stay forever and chasing them over and over again for the sake of 'happiness' is temporary.
Suffering, in Buddhism, is life. Life is suffering.
A part of me does not like to think of life as suffering. What's the point of living, giving birth to children who would suffer all life long? What I think we should take home from the point is that life is suffering, but we do not have to suffer. Nothing in this life is perfect, nothing is permanent, whether good or bad. The point of knowing that life is suffering is so that we don't cling to things and have hope that the lighthearted outweighs the heartbreaking.
Hope. I think that is the kind of life-saving rope that we want people to throw towards us when we think we are drowning. And people DO throw that kind of rope to us, it remains our decision to take it or not.
We must accept that there are challenges in the midst of the bliss, and happiness happens in between. Clinging to bliss is also an attachment and not encouraged because nothing stays blissful forever. Even the happiest couples in the best of marriages will be parted in the end. The point is to make that partnership in between life and death as dotted with happiness as possible without clinging to them.
My cousin's early death made me think a little harder than most other times about the time of reckoning. I sometimes think of her and felt that she wasn't given ample time to map out her rest of my life story.
But we don't know when our time is up. Hence, all along our journey, we should already be writing the rest of our story, anyway.
It's about a woman who buried her husband only to find out that he had been cheating on her all these while. Her grief took on a new shape and yet, she still yearned for the husband that she thought she had while anger was hanging over her like a dark cloud. There was to be no closure, no confrontation, no explanation, no hacking it out, no way to hold her husband or let him go.
She went on a 10-day silent retreat after that, where participants do nothing but meditate and stay silent throughout. Everything that they felt, they were released and thought about in their own silent minds.
A lot of people pursue happiness in the form of short term fixes. a night-out with their friends, a joint, a holiday, a new handbag, delicious cheese cake, etc. None of those things stay forever and chasing them over and over again for the sake of 'happiness' is temporary.
Suffering, in Buddhism, is life. Life is suffering.
A part of me does not like to think of life as suffering. What's the point of living, giving birth to children who would suffer all life long? What I think we should take home from the point is that life is suffering, but we do not have to suffer. Nothing in this life is perfect, nothing is permanent, whether good or bad. The point of knowing that life is suffering is so that we don't cling to things and have hope that the lighthearted outweighs the heartbreaking.
Hope. I think that is the kind of life-saving rope that we want people to throw towards us when we think we are drowning. And people DO throw that kind of rope to us, it remains our decision to take it or not.
We must accept that there are challenges in the midst of the bliss, and happiness happens in between. Clinging to bliss is also an attachment and not encouraged because nothing stays blissful forever. Even the happiest couples in the best of marriages will be parted in the end. The point is to make that partnership in between life and death as dotted with happiness as possible without clinging to them.
My cousin's early death made me think a little harder than most other times about the time of reckoning. I sometimes think of her and felt that she wasn't given ample time to map out her rest of my life story.
But we don't know when our time is up. Hence, all along our journey, we should already be writing the rest of our story, anyway.
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