I've drawn support from the work of Buddhist author Pema Chödrön in many different ways over the years, but I find myself returning to a passage from When Things Fall Apart over and over again:
We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who's awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience that we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head... To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. [1]
One of the greatest gifts Chödrön has to offer us--in this passage and throughout her work--is her recognition and acceptance of the inevitable limits on our agency and control. This perspective can pose a stark contrast with the upbeat, can-do message of positive psychology and its emphasis on the power of our agency and control. But rather than locate these schools of thought in opposition to each other, I see them as complementary.
We can and should seek out opportunities to take action and influence our circumstances, particularly given what psychological research tells about the power of reframing, i.e. our interpretation of a given situation deeply shapes our emotional experience of that situation. [2] But the tools of positive psychology aren't magical amulets that ward off calamities. Despite our best efforts, houses will burn, people will die, tumors will grow, and bricks will fall.
And yet even while we employ those tools to help us cope with such disasters, it's worth bearing in mind that disasters are intrinsic elements of the human experience. Try as we might to build the perfect nest and seek shelter there, we will be thrown out, and that's an inevitable consequence of being alive, being human, being awake.
Footnotes
[1] When Things Fall Apart, page 70 (Pema Chödrön, 1997)
[2] For more on reframing:
- Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive and social consequences (James Gross, Psychophysiology, 2003)
- "Appraisal Theory: Overview, Assumptions, Varieties, Controversies," pages 6-8 (Ira Roseman and Craig Smith, Chapter 1 in Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research, Klaus Scherer, Angela Schorr and Tom Johnstone, editors, 2001)
Photo by Henry Burrows.
