Grasping at straws

In the last post I showed how too many choices can cause misery. But suppose, you ask, that I made a great choice. Suppose I know for sure that there is, never was, and never could be any better choice. I’m certain I have what I want and need. Shouldn’t everything be hunky-dory now? In a word, no.

Buddhism teaches that life can be really difficult at times and that the root cause of this difficulty is attachment. Attachment is the reason your perfect choice can still cause suffering. This doesn’t mean you should avoid all emails with the little paper clip icon. We’re talking about a different type of attachment.

To find out what I mean by attachment we’ll consult my favorite spiritual authority, Webster. Webster defines attachment as the state of being personally attached, and attached as permanently fixed. So an attachment is something to which we are personally and permanently fixed.

It’s the “permanently” part that causes all the trouble, because nothing is permanent. Change is the only thing you can count on. You perfect car eventually ends up in the junk yard, or gets resurrected as chicken coop if you live in Kentucky. That perfect diamond stylus for your perfect turntable becomes pointless. Your perfect fitness club body ages and sags. Your friends move away. Your family joins the Jim Jones Flavor Aid club. And then to top it all off, no matter what you do, you die. Oops!

The point is that you will eventually lose everything you hold dear. If you pin your happiness and peace of mind to anyone or anything , you will end up miserable. Happiness must come from inside you. It cannot come from any external influence, but from a simple decision you make to live that way. As Abraham Lincoln said, "People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

It’s even worse is when you become attached to your thoughts, values, and beliefs, because you are what you think. You create your world with your thoughts, and even they tend to get demolished by time and changing circumstances. You can replace your car, audio system, friends, and to some extent your family; but what do you do when your core beliefs and values no longer exist? What is left when the thoughts you are attached to are destroyed? Suffering.

I speak with some authority on this subject because I have personal experience with it. One fine evening in 1969 I was told that unless I had surgery I would only live 6 months to 2 years, most of that time in a hospital on life support. With the surgery I might live 5 to 10 years until creeping respiratory paralysis finally caused the pneumonia that would end my life. I had a 10% chance of dying during the surgery and a 50% chance I'd come out of it totally paralyzed. I had 15 minutes to make a decision. Great choices. What were the lyrics to that Rolling Stones song?

Whatever world I knew or dreamed of was destroyed. Nothing was familiar. I didn't even know how to think about the world. All the things that had been important to me stop mattering. I quickly realized that material possessions, degrees, careers, awards, accomplishments, adoration, or recognition could not help me. They were no longer relevant. To paraphrase Paul Simon, I stood alone without beliefs.

Just like everyone else in that type of situation I suffered for quite a while. I was really good at it. Then I learned to move beyond those two manifestations of attachment, hope and fear. I gave up any hope that I would get my former life and beliefs back, hope that I could control what would happen to me, hope that I could ever get out of this world alive. I gave up the fear of losing my dreams, fear of losing control, fear of losing my life.

I didn’t exactly like the idea, but once I considered myself already dead life got much easier. I was able to build a brave new world free of the attachments that had held me captive and kept me unhappy even before I received my death sentence. As a result I have enjoyed every minute of my life, even the bad ones. Janis Joplin was right, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Once you begin to get free of attachments you realize you can remain permanently fixed to absolutely nothing. If you have nothing, then you have nothing to lose. Freedom.

You can become free too. Quite often it takes some kind of terrible trauma to shock a person into really looking at the nature of his life and attachments. But I don’t believe you have to wait for your life to be destroyed to start building a better one for yourself, and wouldn’t recommend it. There is no reason you cannot begin today to develop the kind of inner peace it takes to honestly face your attachments and begin to loosen their grip over you. There are many techniques for doing so.

In my next post I’ll describe a simple Ch'i Kung method you can use to calm your mind, heal your body, and let your attachments begin slip slidin’ away. In the meantime I’d suggest you learn a bit more about attachment from a more authoritative source than I by going here. And every time you find yourself using a long held belief to keep yourself imprisoned in old, bad habits ask yourself this question:

Are you sure?

If you're sure, then you're attached. If you're attached, you're looking for trouble. Maybe you need to permanently fix your attitude.

"Grasping at things can only yield one of two results:
Either the thing you are grasping at disappears, or you yourself disappear.
It is only a matter of which occurs first."
Goenka

Recommended reading:
The Places that Scare You, Pema Chodron
An Open Heart, The Dalai Lama

The choice is yours

Last week I sent out a link to an editorial by James Kunstler about the peak oil situation. One respondent, while discussing various lifestyle options said, "...most Americans don't want to live that way." Therein lies the rub. As The Rolling Stones so aptly put it, "You can't always get what you want." This is true whether the peak oil pundits are right, wrong, or in between; which brings up an important question. Is that always so bad?

As illogical as it seems at first, the answer is "No". I have two reasons for taking that position, one from current psychology and the other from Buddhism. They go by the terms "the paradox of choice" and "attachment". Let me start with the paradox of choice.

I have long believed that the reason so many of my generation were, and are, seriously screwed up is because we had too many choices. In fact, we were the first generation to have had very many choices at all. Before the baby boomers, most people just had to do whatever they could to get by. There were few options. A lucky few in the upper middle class might be able to attend college, but few choices existed even there. They, and even wealthier people, usually worked in the family business or in the business of a family friend.

But boomers grew up in a time of unprecedented prosperity and mobility. It seemed like we'd be able to live anywhere, study anything, take our pick of jobs, and buy any of the hundreds of new products that were being invented. Having so many choices drove us crazy, or so I believed. Recent research in psychology indicates I was correct.

The March 4, 2004 issue of Scientific American included an article by Barry Schwartz called "The Tyranny of Choice"*. It discussed research that indicated that too many choices could cause suffering, especially among people he called Maximizers. Maximizers are people who absolutely must make the best decision possible. Even simple decisions can require hours and hours of searching and many sleepless nights.

A maximizer's suffering continues even after a choice is made. Sometimes it gets worse after a decision is made because he constantly second-guesses himself. Maximizers need to be sure that every choice they ever made really was the best possible choice. God forbid the maximizer finds evidence that a better decision could have been made, because then the real torment and self-abuse begins. Maximizers are merciless and punish themselves relentlessly for mistakes.

Satificers, Schwartz's other category of decision-makers, fare better because they are content with "good enough". But even extremely low maintenance satisficers must spend too much time and energy when faced with a multitude choices. At the very least we must separate the absolutely inferior and absolutely too expensive (or difficult) choices so we can pick something in the middle. Even when there are no clear winners and losers, we often feel the need to do more than just close our eyes and point.

Take coffee for example. I'm not too fussy about coffee, but I at least think about whether I want organic, fair trade, or plain old pesticide-saturated-ruthless-capitalism coffee. If I decide I want organic coffee I end up in Whole Food looking at 37 bags of different coffees from all over the world. I seem to recall a time in the not too distant past when coffee choices were pretty much limited to two options, Folgers or Maxwell House. And if I wanted decaf I could choose between Sanka and Sanka. I didn't need to ask whether it was decaffeinated with solvents like ethyl acetate or by the natural Swiss water process.

Sometimes no choices make life easier still if. I remember a time in my late 30s when I was still living slightly below the poverty line. I was watching a commercial for new cars at 0% interest. I remember thinking that one nice thing about being so poor was that I didn't even need to think about whether I should take advantage of this great deal and replace my aging Pinto. It was one less thing to worry over.

I've found I'm not alone in this. I know several people who lived ten or more years in poverty before moving up to the middle or upper middle class. While we all agree we'd prefer not to be poor again, we all sometimes miss the simplicity of that lifestyle. We spent much less time and energy making decisions because our options were so severely limited.

The Voluntary Simplicity movement notwithstanding we humans, and Americans in particular, are not good at limiting our own options. Whether we're maximizers or satisficers we feel obligated to make everything bigger and better. That includes the number of options we have even when more is really less. It's much easier for us if external forces limit our options. At the very least it gives us someone else to blame for our perceived unhappiness caused by lack of control.

So if peak oil, deranged politicians, global warming, The Home Shopping Network, or your own bad habits put you in a situation where "you can't always get what you want", relax. Like The Rolling Stones "...you might just find, you get what you need." That being more time to enjoy your life and less fretting over decisions that are essentially meaningless.

Next time, when I discuss "attachment", I’ll explain how even getting what you want can make you miserable. In the meantime contemplate that old Buddhist koan, "What is the sound of too many options falling by the wayside?"


*Barry Schwartz has since published a book on the subject called The Paradox of Choice