Sad Songs

The best songs hurt. They bring us into heightened awareness of our own pain. They strip away the sugar coating and lay bare the hard truths of life – love often ends, youth fades, and death awaits us all. Yet we keep listening because as John Mellencamp sang, it hurts so good.

Why do we like sad songs? Why are despair, loss, horror, and all manner of violence our staple form of entertainment? What primal, unconscious need fills the theater every time the next end of the world apocalyptic movie comes out? Why do we love seeing it all torn down?

Aristotle wrote that the purpose of tragedy in art is catharsis, a purging. In other words, as we identify with the protagonist in a song, film, book, or play, and as we witness them suffer through trials and tribulations, we vicariously suffer along with them and undergo an emotional emptying out. In some way this is psychologically beneficial, just as vomiting allows the body to expel toxic material. No one likes vomiting – but you always feel a little better afterwards. Same with a good cry. If we kept all this emotional pain bottled up inside the toxicity would overwhelm us. That’s why sad songs make us feel better. Tragic art, Aristotle argued, serves an essential purpose – it keeps us from going crazy.

The sad fact is that life is predicated on the taking of other life. To survive we must constantly consume other living things – plants, animals, fungus – and all of that at once in a mushroom and shallot omelet. Our existence inexorably causes suffering for other life forms. None of us chose this, yet here we are. We must participate in it just as all of the rest of nature does. In many ways, art, myth, and religion help us cope with the horrible fact of this ceaseless killing. They help us contextualize and navigate through what would otherwise be paralyzing guilt.

And lurking behind the curtain is this one last disconcerting fact – we too are food. We may have eliminated many of our natural predators – here in California the only grizzly bear left is the one on the flag – but death still flags our every step. Sharks ply the waters, cougars stalk  the backcountry, and the most dangerous predator of all, man, well, they’re everywhere, and commonly armed. And then there’s this – our cells turn cancerous. Sometimes your heart just stops for no reason.  All of this impermanence weighs heavily on our minds, and we know that these forms are fleeting. But we have to go on. We’re going to swim in the ocean anyway, and hike these trails, and mingle with other people everywhere we go. We try to stay healthy, but only the most deluded among us believes that they’re in control. In the end, we have to be ready to let go of all of it without a moment’s notice.

That’s why art is so important. It helps us celebrate the beauties of being alive, and it helps us practice the fine art of letting go.

Art administers to the instrument of empathy. By flexing and strengthening our imaginations through engagement with art we become better able to empathize with the suffering of others. As we identify with characters in stories or songs from other times and places – people very different from us – we learn to look past surface differences and realize our underlying unity.

Art even has the power to ameliorate the unavoidable conflicts that naturally arise in our relationships with difficult people. By helping us imaginatively stand in the shoes of our nemeses, art deconstructs the machinery of hatred and violence. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” Art opens up and makes alive those secret histories and suddenly we see our so-called enemies as wounded, frightened, desperate people employing unskillful means. We realize their hostility has nothing to do with us and the door to compassion, forgiveness, and healing begins to crack open just a little bit. Art wrests hope from the jaws of despair.

Art is a lot of things. It’s entertainment. It’s titillation. It’s preaching and pedantry. It’s aesthetic rapture. It’s play. It’s remembrance and commemoration. It’s all of that and more. And the best art accomplishes nearly all of those goals in one fell swoop. Art that merely preaches is condescending and ineffective. Art that merely entertains is hollow and manipulative. Art that merely commemorates is tired and boring. Art that pointlessly wallows in the horror of existence is juvenile and jaded.

For any of the various messages or purposes of art to successfully transmit from artists to perceivers it must have one over-arching quality – the power to redeem. There’s a reason we often hear the phrase in art criticism – that book, that song, that film has “no redeeming qualities.” It’s the ultimate dismissal.

For art to be redeeming it must bring us from disease to wellness, from chaos to order, from disintegration to integration, from dysfunction to function – in other words, it must heal us. In this sense then good art is transactional. It draws us into an unwitting exchange – our suffering for art’s transformative power. Drawn into aesthetic ecstasy, our private torment is universalized and our isolation is shattered. By some mysterious transference we are made right with the world, and with ourselves. Art pays the ransom and frees us from our chains. Art saves.

The best songs awaken us to our higher purpose by breaking through our carefully cultivated façade and disrupting our well-practiced routine. Especially sad songs. They unmask us. They remind us what love is. They embolden our sacrifice. They enliven our courage. They soften our fixation. They celebrate our humanity. They call us to our best selves.

We are a story telling species. Since the dawn of humankind we have used language, melody, rhythm, dance, painting and sculpture, to weave narratives out of our imaginations, mythologizing the forces of nature, personifying the animal beings around us, and casting our own likeness in the epic tales of the hero. As we live through our heroes we face every monster, conquer every foe, overcome every obstacle, and survive every test. It is through our art that we practice living our lives. Art is a test-run where we take on terror, play at savagery, explore the boundaries of our rapacious appetites, and learn where the traps are – the traps that lay low the arrogant warrior too proud and too in love with his own visage.

If you make art – if you write songs or poems or plays or stories, if you make films or photographs or sculptures or paintings, if you choreograph dance – stay true to your ancient calling. Let art lead us toward a bolder, more authentic life. Warn us of the pitfalls. Celebrate the beauties. And never let us forget that we are here for one reason – to thrive and serve and fully surrender to the rapture of being alive. The characters in the films, books, and songs we love are mirrors held up to our own agonizing questions, and they show us that there is a way forward out of the fog of our confusion and into healing, wholeness, and the sense that it’s going to be OK, no matter what.

The Broken Places

When a bone breaks and heals, the newly grown bone material at the fracture is stronger than the intact bone around the break. If the bone breaks again, it won’t be there.

So too our character is strengthened by the painful stresses and fractures life so readily affords. The healed places become our strong points.

Seen in this light, the disappointments, failures and miseries of our lives become irreplaceable, essential experiences. Without them we would be incapable of rising to our magnificent potential, fulfilling our larger purpose and realizing our deepest happiness. Nothing strengthens our core as much as heartbreak.

Armed with this information, a reassessment is in order. It’s time to look at our lives differently. Fear, it turns out, is not our friend.

Avoiding risk, playing it safe, carefully hiding from challenges and seeking comfort are the worst things you can do. Instead, identify the things you are afraid of and run toward them.

This is why growing older is so often associated with growing wiser. As you grow older life’s miseries inevitably visit you with increasing frequency. Loved ones die. Goals go unrealized. Things fall apart. And as these trials are endured, a dawning realization arises. Despite all of the tears, you’re going to be O.K. Beneath the suffering of the surface lays a deep and abiding harmony. Every spring in the forest, without fail, the flowers bloom and deer give birth to fawns. As Woody Allen said, “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.”

As our hair falls out, our skin begins to sag, our hearing fades and stairs get inexplicably steeper, there is a simultaneous expansion of our generosity of spirit – we no longer insist on seeing everything through the lens of “what’s in it for me.” We come to learn that none of us owns any of this, it’s all borrowed, and we grow defter at releasing our grasp and graciously accepting the transitory nature of all things. In this renunciation there is a deep and abiding joy – a joy reached no other way but through the acceptance of loss and the catharsis of tears.

As I write, my old dog Boone sleeps at my feet beneath the desk. He’s a handsome fourteen year old Brittany spaniel. Most of his hearing is gone, he falls down all the time, and the light is slowly fading from his eyes. I know that day is coming soon when I’ll lift him into the back seat of the car for one last, slow ride to the veterinarian’s office.  I’ll sit with Boone on the floor of the examination room and the vet and her assistant will come in and sit on the floor with us. We’ll look at each other without a word, and then I’ll nod yes as the veterinarian administers the lethal dose of anesthesia. I’ll hold him in my arms as he takes his last breath and his body goes limp. I owe that to him, to be there, to let him die in his favorite place – my arms. Sure, I’ll be bawling my eyes out. And I won’t enjoy it. But I’ll accept it. I already do. I have to. I knew this day was coming twelve years ago when we drove him home from the rescue kennel, a spry two year old, full of vim and vigor.

We know nothing lasts, but we fall in love anyway. It won’t be the first time I’ve put a dog down, and it won’t be the last. But saying yes to love means saying yes to everything else, and it’s childish to pick and choose experiences as if life were a simple consumer experience, a shopping trip where you only get what you want.

If you want any of it, you must say yes to all of it.

Our tears, our disappointments, and our failures are the engines of our emergence. In the end, we must have gratitude even for our suffering. Protecting ourselves from life’s vicissitudes stifles and ultimately extinguishes our spirit the way a shovel of dirt extinguishes a campfire. Besides, it isn’t possible anyway. No one escapes unscathed. Security is an illusion. The only choice left to us is moving forward with a yes on our lips instead of a no.

And suffering is not yet done giving gifts.

When we live consciously awake to our suffering, fully acknowledging the way our wounds construct the frame upon which our magnificence is built, we gain an unprecedented capacity for compassion. We empathize with a boldness the timid egotist dare not gamble. With new eyes we see the imperfections of others not as problems, but as opportunities. We still hold high standards and even higher aspirations for ourselves and others, but we accept ourselves and others as is. As the Zen saying goes, “You’re perfect just the way you are, but you could use a little improvement.”

We are now more readily able to forgive. We know that people are only as good as they know how to be. It isn’t moral weakness as much as cognitive error that drives the evil of the world – even the criminal believes they are actualizing their highest good as best they understand it. All of us are limited and bound by our current mode of thinking, our current concept of ourselves and the world. As we interact with others in the workplace, in our families, and in our communities, we soften our glance, stand firm, and sway to and fro like tall trees in high wind. Our flexibility is our strength. Our own woundedness and our own imperfection are the talismans that unlock our vision into the woundedness of others. We get better at hearing what isn’t said, seeing what isn’t shown and knowing what can’t be known. Yes it’s a paradox. But such is the mystery at the center of all things.

The last gift of our broken places is a deep and vibrant humility. Because we have been laid low by the body blows of grief and sorrow, we know full well that we are not in charge of any of this. We are merely witnesses.  We engage as effectively and powerfully as we can, intending to do good, aspiring to build great things and practicing our craft as consciously as possible.  And yet, no matter how flexible you are, a sudden gust can knock it all down. The ephemeral, transitory nature of reality humbles all but the most stubbornly ignorant among us. Wisdom understands its weakness in the face of larger forces.

The broken places, in us and in others, fortify us, teach us, and in the final analysis hold us all together. We are supported in all we do by the strength of our broken places. And there is still one final revelation. Not only is our strength, our empathy, our forgiveness, and our humility rooted in our wounds, but so is our love. Love is the flowering and the fruition of our strength, our empathy, our forgiveness and our humility – each of these experiences, each of these modes of consciousness leads us into the heart of the sacred fire, a fire that at once burns away everything about us that is inauthentic, while forging an unbreakable bond between all of the things that matter. From now on, every chasm bridged, every wound healed, and every longing fulfilled. This is how we grow whole from the broken places.

Afterword
Boone died on Wednesday, October 23, 2013 at 4:25 p.m., two days after I submitted this column to my editor for publication in the San Diego Troubadour. He faded suddenly, and as he struggled to breathe on that long last afternoon, we eased his passing with an overdose of anesthesia. Just like I promised him we would.

The Nature of Craving

We’re trapped in a hungry animal. Gasping for air, thirsty all the time, burning fuel like a Colorado wildfire – we have, shall we say, certain needs. And no matter how much air, water and food we devour, our needs go on unabated. There is no end to the hunger.

Life itself is one giant alimentary canal. Life-forms go in one end, poop comes out the other. I didn’t make the rules. This is just the way it is.

To demonize desire, therefore, is to demonize life.

But we also recognize that our desires are not very smart. They don’t have a brain. If left unchecked, they’d kill us. Addiction, obesity, debauchery, all manner of disease-causing overconsumption – desire is a terrible steward of the life-form it inhabits.

Without desire, we’re dead. With desire, our lives are in constant peril. Philosophers have long struggled with this paradox, working hard to draw a line between healthy and unhealthy hunger.  From their work a few simple principles emerge. Since desire itself is neither good nor evil it falls on our skills of discernment to distinguish the good from the bad. Pious platitudes and blanket taboos fail where subtler insights prevail. It’s time for us to grow up and move into a more sophisticated philosophy of desire.

Perhaps a simple test, consisting of a few salient questions, could help us steer a course through the minefield of our endless hunger.

When faced with a craving, ask yourself the following seven questions:

1.      If I do this, will it bring me real joy and deep satisfaction, as opposed to merely short-term pleasure?

2.      Will it expand my ability to be of service to others?

3.      Does it resonate with my higher sensibilities?

4.      Would I consent to public disclosure of this activity, as opposed to secrecy?

5.      Would this activity leave me with a lingering sense of beauty, as opposed to regret, embarrassment or shame?

6.      Is this proposed activity rooted in love of self and others? 

7.      Is this activity rooted in honoring the inherent dignity of all living things?

If you can answer yes to one of these questions then your desire is a healthy one. Do it. And by the way – if you answer yes to one of these questions, you’ve implicitly answered yes to all of them.

If you cannot answer yes to even one of these questions then your desire is an unhealthy one. Don’t do it. It won’t further your own interest or anyone else’s.

Behind this simple strategy is the idea that each of us carries within us an internal moral compass, a deeply ingrained and universal sense of right and wrong. Religious teachings, sacred texts and well-constructed ethical philosophies are nice, but they tend to create as many problems as they solve. The Bible is a good example. It contains some of the most sublime moral teachings ever written alongside some of the worst examples of cruelty, ignorance and bigotry in the history of religion. We must read any sacred text with our hearts awake, our God-given minds engaged and our intuition open to the sublime insights inspired in us by the words of the ancients. Our philosophies and theologies serve us best when they call us to our own wisdom.

Wanting to expand the scope of one’s life through the acquisition of new skills and the mastery of a craft is not wrong. It is not wrong to want to be more, to see more, to know more, to grow more. As long as your longing for expansion aligns with the seven questions, you’re fine. Nothing’s gained by playing it small and hiding your light. If carried out with humility, self-respect, love for others and the consciousness of service, pursuing one’s own greatness brings a much needed blessing to the world. A tree does not apologize for growing. Why should we? We are all blessed by the abundance of a tree’s fragrant fruit and sheltering shade. Having no ego, the tree is never foolish enough to claim credit. It just stands there with nothing to prove, allowing its inherent magnificence to do all the talking. Successful people understand this, and see their prosperity in this same light.

Seeking wealth, fame and power over others to fill an aching wound, on the other hand, is a pathological craving that generates only suffering for oneself and others. It violates one, and therefore all of the seven questions. Without humility and the consciousness of service, our growth, acquisition and expansion take on a cancerous quality that threatens the health of the whole. Seen through the lens of competition, we view the success of others with envy and covetousness. We cannot be happy unless we have more than everyone else. No matter how skillful we become at attracting material wealth, joy eludes us because we see ourselves in conflict with everyone and everything instead of as an integral expression of the universe in harmonious concert with itself.

In this light, drug addiction, alcoholism, overeating, serial shopping, and all other forms of compulsive acquisition are not moral weakness as much as they are cognitive errors – faulty calculations of how best to maximize our long-term self-interest. The active meth addict and the clean and sober meth addict in recovery are both pursuing their self-interest. One is simply objectively better at it than the other. We all naturally lean toward the good. Some of us are just better at figuring out what that actually means.

The great Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas and the pagan Plato agree – there is only one power and presence in the universe and it is the Good. Whether we of our own free will come to understand it and manifest it through our choices and actions is another matter entirely.

This is why it is so important, on both a personal and societal level, that each of us does the hard work of relentless and unflinching self-examination. It’s the only thing that works. It’s the only way to break the spell our bad habits and unconscious cravings cast over us. When we do not have clarity and vision and act instead from our mindless conditioning, great harm results, to ourselves and to those around us.

Hunger and desire are not the problem. They never were. They were convenient scapegoats upon which to heap all the blame. Our Puritanical impulses are born of this great misunderstanding. It’s not censorship and abstinence we need – it’s consciousness and awakening, grounded in compassion for ourselves and others. Say yes to that which serves our highest good and no to that which doesn’t. It’s not complicated. It’s not mysterious. We carry within us the gold standard by which all actions can be tested – our God-given minds, our awakening hearts and our memory of what worked and didn’t work in the past. We know what to do and we know how to do it. All that’s left is a decision.

Transience

“You can’t step in the same river twice.” ~ Heraclitus

         This just in from the Department of the Painfully Obvious: everything changes.

         The transient nature of life puts us in a precarious position.  Lulled into complacency by the apparent solidity of the world, again and again we are shocked, shocked I say, by life’s sudden transitions – the terrible phone call, the cancer diagnosis, the death of a friend.  Like Charlie Brown we fervently believe that this time Lucy will hold the football in place.  But every time we go to kick it, it isn’t there.

         Intellectually we know that everything born dies, every day turns to night and every song fades into silence.  But like a sharp pain this awareness is dulled by the narcosis of forgetfulness.  Like nodding drunkards we fall over and over into the unconscious illusion that all of this will last, that we have more time, that there is always tomorrow.  Actually, there isn’t.

         There is only now.

         And when you reach out to grab it, even it is gone, replaced by another now moment.  That’s why grasping is so futile.  There is nothing to grasp.

         In Buddhism this fundamental fact is known as anitya or impermanence.  But don’t take Buddha’s word for it.  Life itself provides us with an ever-growing mound of incontrovertible evidence.

         If one follows this reasonable premise to its logical conclusion, we arrive at another core Buddhist teaching, shunyata.  Shunyata is usually translated as “emptiness” or “the void,” but those approximations distort as much as they reveal.

         What shunyata actually conveys is the fundamentally indefinable nature of reality.  Whatever all of this is, it is beyond all concepts and cannot be turned into a thought, let alone a word.  Shunyata is the field of pure potentiality out of which all forms arise and to which all forms return.  Yet shunyata itself remains ever formless.  So in that sense it is empty of fixed forms.  But it is most definitely not nothing.

         Shunyata is like a clear sky and things are like clouds.  Clouds arise and take form, last a while, then disperse, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly.  This is the nature of all things.  As he lay down to die, the Buddha left his students with one last thought.  It was something he had said many times before, but given the situation, he thought they ought to hear it one last time.  “Remember this,” he said, “all forms arise and all forms fade.” 

         Knowing this enables us to navigate the strange and beautiful arcs of our lives with a modicum of dignity and joy, knowing that we don’t own any of it, it is all borrowed, and we must give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning.  Even in the face of the transience of all things it would be wrong to conclude that nothing matters – quite the contrary.  Everything matters, and more than you ever thought possible.

         Every fleeting moment has a magical quality, a sacred ordinariness that we mostly miss, caught as we often are in dreams of yesterday and tomorrow.  Only when we come back to this now moment do we tap into the real. 

         There is no such thing as the past.  What we call the past is just a thought, a memory of a previous event, captured and pinned like a dead butterfly on a cork board.  Time spent wallowing in the past is time stolen from the now. 

         The future is even less real than the past because it hasn’t even happened yet.  It’s just speculation and fantasy.  Dwelling in the future, whether in pleasant fantasy or torturous worry, is also time stolen from the now.

         We cannot change the past.  It is forever out of reach.  The future is equally elusive and beyond our grasp.  What we call the past or the future is only a thought and thoughts by their very nature exist only in the now.  We are only and forever rooted in the now.  Now is the only place we will ever be.  This is where we think, act, feel, love, share, and have our being.  And yet most of us spend very little time here, caught forever in thoughts of the past or the future.

         Buddhist practice seeks to draw us out of our thought-world and back into an immediate awareness of our authentic nature.  But what is it going to take to get us out of our head and back into our heart?

         Meditation, devotion, prayer, service, loving-kindness, empathy, compassion – these are the core practices of all spiritual traditions.  As the Tibetan saying goes, “Want to go to hell?  Think of yourself.  Want to go to heaven?  Think of others.” 

         Before this kind of advanced practice can really take root – it takes great courage, stamina and habituation to truly be compassionate – a good way to jump-start your road to spiritual recovery is to get out in nature.  It’s difficult to stay stuck in your head when you’re walking across fallow grassland in a cold winter wind under a deep blue sky with a murder of crows swirling around you in Van Gogh spirals, the smell of rain on distant mountains awakening ancient bonds nearly forgotten in the discordant isolation of city life.  For one blessed moment you are pulled out of your precious thought-stream and suddenly find yourself standing still with both feet on the ground at the center of the universe and everything is turning in one endless web of interconnected being.  There is no path, there are no crows, there is no you – there is only the achingly beautiful totality, all of it shimmering with infinite significance, all of it radiant with loving-kindness.

         Another good way to begin awakening is through music.  Of all the art forms music most plainly reminds us of the fundamental emptiness of reality.  It’s invisible and ungraspable.  It exists only in this now moment.  We do not control it.  We experience it fully only to the extent that we are able to come out of our thoughts and enter the present, allowing its myriad waves to wash over us and rock us gently into sweet surrender.  Music, all music, is about seduction.  It pursues us until we relent.  And when we do, we are rewarded with reverence and communion – reverence for the sacred nature of all that is and communion with our own unity with the sacred.  In the depths of music the secret of our infinite value is revealed, not as a thought, but as a direct, immediate experience that transcends thought.  This is why we listen to our favorite music over and over again.  We long for that union, that affirmation of our deep and abiding significance, our ultimate oneness with the source.  The harmonies and rhythms of music wordlessly replicate the intricacies and nuances of reality itself, and in this reproduction we behold a mirror in which we can better see ourselves.

             When things change, and they will – when those we love are taken from us, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly and without warning, when we find ourselves all alone in a field with nothing but the wind to hold onto, we are drawn into a powerful and liberating awareness.  We see through our tears that no matter what there is an unbroken light, an unchanging love that binds it all together, despite the apparent transience.