It feels a lot like coming home. Like walking back after a sunny sábado de tianguis, right hand locked with my mother’s, left hand holding that bag of tamales wrapped in dried corn leaf, uno de mole y uno de dulce, the delightful smell wafting all the way up to our noses. Like grabbing my notebooks out of my schoolbag and onto my desk, just knowing, not questioning, that homework time shall begin immediately after lunch. Like those two-hour nightly commutes after math sessions, coated in impish excitement, blind to the effort of switching between two subway lines, then to a bus, and then to walking some more, because how cool would it be to mentally solve that last problem nobody could crack, without using even a scrap of paper.
Or like subtly noticing that we’re now inside city limits, the movie on my screen rolling its credits, the boring yellow plains lining the highway slowly replaced by boring concrete. Feeling a bit carsick as usual after stepping out into the bus station, spotting my father standing there with open arms, a hug, and a “welcome home.”
Or like the steady stream of familiarity after hopping off the plane, the green road signs with white font and all caps, the yellow paint chipping off from the railings, the car radio playing Maná, or Julieta Venegas, or those two political commentators. Excitement and thoughts of a warm meal. The I’m doing well’s to the how are you’s, the unspoken I love you so much and I’ve been through a lot and I want to spend every second with you to the fullest and I don’t know how but I’m scared because as we grow apart there’s a chance that I won’t see you again”. The soothing aroma of dumplings on the dinner table.
It feels a lot like coming home. That sense of “ah, now this feels like me.” I remember it, I forget it, I welcome it, I dread it, I allow it, I deny it, I see it, I hear it, I sense it, I smell it, I taste it. Even though I know it was important, it feels as elusive as a dream. Have I learned anything at all?
I’ve recently returned from two weeks of silent retreat. As usual, it’s weird to talk after two weeks of mostly bowing to each other. It’s weird to run after getting used to walking at the speed of a tortoise. It’s weird to think after, well, not thinking, and not doing much of anything really. It’s not as weird this time around though, which I’m not sure whether it’s a sign of a reduced intensity of practice, or more maturity. This time around, my mind cares less.
I went into retreat hoping to dispel some doubts about what is “real”, and what is “meaningful”. It’s a bit funny because, even though retreats are about letting go of the past and the future, including any expectations about retreat that we may have brought with us, people still come to them to process stuff happening in their lives. Crises of identity, the passing of a loved one, the silent burden of trauma, big or small, fresh or long buried beneath the layers of white lies and rationalizations like plaster applied urgently, haphazardly, to plug the leaks from a broken wall. In my case, the doubt was subtle, but it nagged at me whenever I paused to ponder the purpose of what I was doing. It hadn’t been too big of a deal, I thought, since I had been too busy being busy to contemplate the meaning of life. My working theory is that most of what most people do, including myself, is almost never connected to a deep sense of purpose. It is, rather, simply inertia. The reason I wake up, brush my teeth, go to work, and rest, instead of pursuing the fabled bohemian life of an artist, travelling around the globe to absorb its unlimited wonders, or retreating in seclusion to solve the mysteries of the universe, is mostly because it is the path of least resistance, to continue doing what I’ve been doing for days, weeks, months, years. However many justifications I tell myself about the direction I’m steering my life towards, say, that it is to make the world better, most of them are rationalizations, since how often is it that I can truly fathom, with the entire scope of its implications, what it means to improve life for billions of beings, or even for just one? There are times in life though, arising naturally when the road ends and splits into a bifurcation, when one does glimpse a fuller spectrum of consequences of one’s actions, makes a decision and resolves that they have understood true meaning of their decision. So I believe in the inertia there is this trust that, while one might not conceive the full weight of their decision at each moment, they had glimpsed that weight before, trusting at that prior moment that their resolve would carry them even in moments of non-clarity.
If you’d asked me the meaning of life, I would have said “to seek supreme happiness, and happiness in the lives of others.” I thought this had been clear to me. I thought this was the resolve underlying the inertia of my actions. I spat at the conventional interpretation of “finding meaning” and was bewildered by the incomprehensibility of those who would spend their lives chasing for it, not knowing what it means for them, like a horse forever trotting towards a carrot dangled by its own rider. To quote Frankl quoting Dostoyevsky: “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” How many mental contortions must one perform to even define this worthiness, when the much simpler reality driving our actions is that there exist good things in experience (good in a very broad sense, I’m not a pure hedonist)? Even conventionally meaningful things like building a family, are they not meaningful simply because they bring good to our experience? How could suffering, in itself as an experience, be meaningful, not counting its instrumental value in seeking the cessation of suffering for oneself and others, a value that can be dissected away from the experience of suffering in itself?
I had been no stranger to some “higher” forms of bliss from previous experiences with non-ordinary states of mind, retreats and otherwise. Tasting this kind of bliss for the first time was one of the most meaningful experiences I’d ever had, or at least it appeared to be at the time. I realized later that this was unlasting. That’s when the seed of doubt was planted. As I experienced more of these blissful moments, I came to see them as some sort of dream - they were time-limited, embedded in circumstances that were not “real life.” I saw myself as living a double life, one in the dream world where happiness and the mysteries of experience dwelled, the other in the coarse normalcy of reality as all dreams would come to an end. I took my refuge in that dream world, obtaining reassurance from the thought that it would always be available - and it sort of was - hoping that it would give meaning to my reality whenever I woke up. However, the same way as one does not usually expect to find dreams to be the meaning of life, so I began to doubt whether these “dreams” had any true meaning. How could they be meaningful, if they were not real? But if the causes and conditions of boundless joy, love, and compassion were to be found in these “dreams”, then would anything actually be meaningful at all?
Something changed about this after this retreat, something I can’t quite yet put into words. Maybe I’m afraid of articulating it so as to not taint it with the definitude of the specks of inaccuracy inherent to language. Have I learned anything at all? If anything, I believe I picked up some stones.
I learned that being mindful is as simple as being aware of the weight of my feet on the ground.
I learned about the purity of the comfort of laying on my back, curling into a ball, and hugging my knees, and about the indelibility of such purity.
I learned that humor is welcome in the least expected of moments when confronted by death, when accompanying death.
I learned that each person’s life, in spite of the unconditionable nature of the spirit, will have had its own earthly flavor, and for however unsavory it can seem to sum up one’s story into a sequence of circumstances and events, words can, really can bring justice and presence to those who have gone away.
I learned that I really like doing nothing, that it is practice even as I do nothing, that practice is something more than a cycle of doing this, doing that, then doing this again.
I learned that shame is always a lie. That regret is welcome if something wrong was done, but shame, that feeling that one’s very own essence is unworthy of love, unworthy of being, has incontrovertibly no place in the world.
I learned that love has different flavors. Love in the face of kindness, love in the face of suffering, love in the face of jubilation, and the love that binds it all together like the moon dimly illuminating the whole night sky.
I learned about the exquisite joy of investigating whether apple peel has a flavor (it does!) and how if it was only for this very moment, my entire life would have been worth living.
I learned how equanimity can feel like a punch in the gut, to take ownership of my actions moment, by moment, by moment, and to move onwards.
I learned how to cry silently in the meditation hall. You just tilt your head a bit up, not too much, just ten degrees so that your being is open to the world and the snot runs down your throat, and let the tears flow freely.
I wonder how it will feel like to come home. How it will feel like in five, ten, twenty, forty years. Where it will be, and even who it will be. How it will be for everyone to come home. To quote Frankl again: “The crowning experience of all, for the homecoming man, is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear any more - except his God.”