Bitter Nuggets
The boat that hit mine
As the darkness of the night enveloped me, I lay still in bed, my breaths deep and even as I tried to coax myself back into slumber. With a sigh I turned to my side pulling my blanket to my chest. “I don’t want to hear it right now!” I mumbled into my blanket like a feisty five-year-old. I had gone to sleep in a bad mood the day before, which meant that I went to sleep easily, my insomnia vanishes every time I am in a bad mood. Waking up in the middle of the night was an indication that meant my mind had come up with a solution or a nugget of wisdom, these are usually bitter and I just wanted to go back to sleep.
The realization that had surfaced my mind stirring me awake was remarkably simple. I could come up with plenty of reasons why I had gone to bed in a bad mood: I had a bad exam, my computer had stopped working for a bit, and a couple of things played out differently from what I had expected bruising my ego. The validity of these things can be debated, nevertheless they all affected me, some more than others. The problem was not their effect on me, the problem was that I kept feeding and indulging these emotions. I spun stories in my mind, thought about it more deeply, and kept babying myself.
Things are bound to affect us in a positive or negative way, the initial effect is out of our control. What we can control though is how long do they affect us for. In order to elaborate let me tell you the modified version of a story my mother told me a long time ago.
‘A monk loved to meditate in the middle of Mayasundari every morning. One morning while meditating he felt another boat hit his. He felt a surge of anger, he tried going back to meditating, but his anger nudged him away. He played out an imaginary argument between him and the person in the other boat, after which he mentally hurled insults at the person in the other boat. After a while he opens his eyes, he looks at the boat ready to actually have an argument. He sees that the boat that had hit his was actually empty and had naturally floated to hit his. All his anger which had been directed towards the imaginary rider of the boat was now directed towards himself for letting his mind drift and wreck his meditation. He chided himself the entire way back’
What the monk did was exactly what we do every day. The boat hit his, he felt angry, he could have left it at that, but he indulged the emotion and had an imaginary argument. When he realized his mistake he could have taken it as a learning, could have been annoyed with himself for a bit, but he did not need to hold on to the anger all the way back home. This holding on to emotions, indulging and fuelling them is what makes us suffer. Even when you are trying to find a solution to a problem or trying to figure out the root cause of the reason why a particular thing affects you the way it does there is no reason to hold on to the emotion during the process. This goes for both positive and negative emotions, even pleasure extracted for external sources if held onto for too long decays.
You can argue with an empty boat all day long, or experience the emotion it stirs within you, savour it if its good, accept it if it is bad, and let it go.
-Sartha
