Talking with Buddha About a Rough Day

Hope and desire, one is the drug and the other the addiction. Walk away, do it now, leave these obsessions and compulsions behind. Accept the pain and regret but know it will fade. Why? Because sometimes you just have to leave quietly abandoning what you thought mattered. What you believed was important simply wasn’t. The truth is the things you want most in life will be denied you. You only hurt yourself when you hope and desire.

Why you can’t get there (wherever there is) is something you can’t fix. Why you can’t have the thing you long for whatever flashy sparkly bauble it might be (or intangible state or accolade) is not amenable to you doing anything to change the situation. Why you are not rewarded when you know you have put the time, effort and energy in (and the product is quality) is most often beyond your control.

You and I just have to keep telling ourselves that we are not the center of the universe and understand what that means. Our hopes and desires aren’t in the calculus of how the world exists on its own terms. We don’t know what is right in a manner that is any more valid than anyone else. But our journey coming to this state of acceptance is something that stymies. Facing the end of a hope or a desire with equanimity proves elusive.

I know I am just facing what everyone else faces. Still the hurt caused by attachment to the hope and desire is so strong. There are times I feel so broken, so lost. Maybe if I work my way through this dark place I will find that acceptance. Maybe I can come to a point where letting go is easy because I never grabbed onto something for my egotistic purposes. The world is and I am; I should be able to grasp that.