It seems to me one of the hardest challenges to overcome in personal growth is seeing what could have been, and wasn’t–specifically, in accepting it.
As we grow as children and emerge into adulthood, we develop approximate set points, behavioral and cognitive tendencies, that tend to persist for long periods of time, often lifetimes. We reconcile ourselves, contextualize ourselves, with those around us. If we more or less fit the pattern, then absent major trauma, we never see any reason to change drastically.
Yet, there is always a gap between what is and what could be. I can’t say how large that gap is, since I can’t see that far into the darkness. I do think I can say, though, provisionally, that that is what the Buddha meant with the term Duhkha, generally translated as suffering. He meant that we are all falling so far short of what is possible that what we term happiness might as well be regarded suffering. Moreover, even happy lives end in old age and death.
As I think even an average mind could readily infer from reading this blog, I have my issues. We all have our crosses to bear, and one thing I’ve noticed is that carrying heavy weights for long distances makes you strong.
At the same time, what I am seeking is efficiency, and that is found traveling light, not weighted down. How do you release that weight?
What I have been seeing more clearly than ever in recent days is that to grow you have to see the gap between what was and what could (if you want to be morose about it, should) have been. There is a mourning process you have to go through, for a possible present that died long ago. To some greater or lesser extent, we are all victimized throughout our lives by human stupidity and greed, including our own. This is not how it should be: it is just how it is.
When we feel pain, I think often the tendency is to disown it, to push it away. You then create a new world, a new way of being, in which that pain is not present to your conscious awareness. But it is still there, and affecting you in ways not immediately obvious, but certainly including self sabotage and lessened effectiveness. The New You has wrapped a protective coating around that pain, but it is there in all your movements, everything you do. The longer you take to process it, the more effect it has over time.
To make it go away, you have to remember who you were, and who you should have been. When you do this, the coating comes off: this is what I think most people fear, and why so many countless hundreds of millions of people live lives of lessened joy.
On a related note, I will add that I saw yesterday something interesting. I was thinking about the process of sin, of breaking your own acknowledged rules. I think it is important, when you sin, to acknowledge it as sin. That way, you retain an uncorrupted primary ethical sense. The alternative is rationalization. If you rationalize, you change who you are and what you believe. I think this is why Lao Tzu counseled against trying to become a saint. Some of the most awful people out there profess themselves to be Christians. They are able to reconcile their professed creed with their actual behavior through rationalization. Once that process starts, there is no necessary end short of utter and complete depravity, as seen for example in the pedophile Catholic priests, or the rape and stoning of women in countries like Pakistan.