The Germans have a proverb: “life is like a chicken coop ladder: shitty and short”. Some lives are like that, particularly in very poor parts of the world today, and for most of the world’s history before that. Disease, hunger, war, hard work: all of them daily experiences.
Modern Americans have eradicated most of the randomness of life, and some are trying to eliminate ALL of it, in the futile hope that this will bring about paradise. What I feel it brings about is emotional emptiness, one that is currently filled for many through their politics and relatively hollow spiritual pursuits, but which is not satisfied fully through such activities, and which thus brings anger and sadness.
What I want to submit here is that Elizabeth Kuebler Ross’s stages of mourning can be applied to the basic proposition “you can’t have it all”, which is a paraphrase of “life is pain.” You can’t EVER have it all. You can’t climb every mountain if you also want to swim every sea, be a good parent, and be socially useful. We must all accept this. We must deflate our ambitions.
Everywhere you see these signs saying something like “follow your bliss”, pursue your dreams, be all you can be. For some people, this is likely good advice. For most, , though,I think it leaves them empty, not least because few are disciplined enough to consistently achieve hard goals. Half the people you know are below average, but they have dreams too.
The first stage of grieving is denial. When you are young, it seems the world is your oyster. You can do and have it all, because you don’t yet know how to plan.
Then you get frustrated–you feel anger–when you realize you CAN’T have it all, and view life as unfair. Note that this can happen on many levels. Poor people in the ghettos are looking to comfortable lives relatively free of violence and ugliness. The rich may be looking for “true love”. In my view, it doesn’t matter where you start or end up, the basic truth applies that you have to accept some circumstance of living if you are to be happy.
Then you alternate Bargaining and Sadness. You hope for something, and sometimes get it, but never enough, if you are looking for happiness “out there”. You alternate hope and despair.
Then resignation. This can end in Sadness, if you don’t actively “refute” the sadness emotionally, by consciously accepting life on its own terms.
This is where the process I spoke of a few days ago under “The Finger” (perhaps a subauspicious title, but I’m leaving it) kicks in. There are processes you can use to flush out the sadness, and anger, and anxiety, and denial, such that emotional states flow OUT of you, rather than in to you from the outside, such that you control your own weather simply by allowing the good to flow out naturally and in an unobstructed way. This is the “doing nothing” of the Tao Te Ching, and the Windhorse of the Tibetans. As I have said, I feel it sometimes. I think it is getting stronger.