Nostalgia, Homesickness, Killing the Buddha and Spring Cleaning
The Peanut Gallery
Homesickness and nostalgia are diseases that are way too easy to catch. I'm writing this from the bedroom where I grew up, and yet I still feel a longing for a place that is no longer. I spent most of the morning watching old home videos where my brothers and I are rarely separate, and all are pardoned for being ignorant or naive.
Good Edifying Thangs
When I'm stuck thinking about what to do in the future, I (dangerously) draw on past memories of feeling fulfilled. In looking for "home" I am reminded of various people in various places that made me feel at home. Building forts with Molly, playing music with Thanasi and Kyle in the park, being in love (more than once)...
And being in this room, I'm reminded of the wall of dried flowers I affectionately referred to during my teenage years as the "relationship graveyard".
Matt Easley and I on our way to the band banquet. Pretty sure those flowers joined the graveyard. Mirka was a total upgrade :)
Nostalgia can confuse any relationship. As I found with my last partner, the first few months were joyous, and yet were so situationed in a very specific time and place that to hold onto those times in comparison to the present would naturally leave me unhappy. Moreover, it made it so that I could not even be in the present and see things as they were... I kept pining over what could have and should have been.
Killing the buddha-- it's a saying that for me, means that when you've found bliss in your life, don't try to hold onto it or expect it to flourish, but to kill it. For me anyway, this makes sense because I have a tendency to aggrandize my zen-like moments to the point where I defeat the purpose of the moments altogether.
Spring cleaning- Okay, so maybe for a less harsh metaphor, rather than killing the Buddha, maybe I'll just work on composting. What I mean, is that I just need to stop and evaluate what I can weed out of my life. This is easier said than done, as many people places and things have been associated with pleasure in the past. Therefore, initially I have a feeling that getting rid of these things mean removing pleasure from my life. However, it's this cleaning and composting process that allows me to make room for new things to come and my own self-betterment. Expecting the present moment (as good as it might be) to be as it was in the past is worse than just seeing the present moment for what it is even if "bad things" happen. Composting is taking things that were once fruitful but have since turned rotten and using them to assist in a new growth cycle.
11/17/11
I just lost a $3,300 car, a board bag worth at least $100, and a lot of my favorite t-shirts and collectibles to a really shady mechanic (do not let anyone you know go anywhere near Affordable Auto!). I bought this car off a craigslist ad that seemed to be "by owner", but turned out to be the niece of "Uncle Jimmy". They told me they were selling the car because the girl who had it before couldn't afford to take it out of impoundment (foreshadowing!)
The week we had together was awesome! We went all around the island together, and this was taken after a day of surfing at Pinetrees.
So within a week of driving this car, it died with a blown head gasket. I had it towed to a mechanic who estimates $4200 damage. I called Uncle Jimmy, and he offered to tow it back to his side of the island and do it for just the price of the parts. This was on July 1st. Every week he kept saying "oh we're real busy this week" or "everybody's on vacation to Oahu right now". Finally, the week before I left for Thailand I made him a deal that if the car wasn't ready when I got back, he would buy it back from me. So then I get back from Thailand and the car is STILL not fixed. He tells me he was waiting for me to front the money for the parts ($1000). So I offered to my roommate that if she paid for the repairs, she could essentially have the car.
I called Jimmy to tell him I wanted to talk to him about the car, and he told me he had to move locations. So he gave us directions to his "new place", and we rolled up and there's my car with "not for parts" written on the windshield. I walked up to it, and started to open the door when this girl came out of nowhere and told me I didn't have the right to touch the car. Confused as hell, I told her "This is my car. All my things are in it... and wtf are you talking about?" She held her ground, so I went to find Jimmy who sheepishly told me he hadn't heard from me and was moving lots... which apparently meant he had no idea how to make outgoing calls to inform me of what was going on. I went back to the car to show the lady the receipt of purchase, and after some bickering she finally let me in... TO FIND THAT ALL MY STUFF WAS TRASHED! And the day ended when she told me that if I wanted my car back, I'd have to pay almost a thousand in impoundment fees. At which point, I walked away.
Even though I lost a lot of money, I now feel weightless from that situation. I held onto the idea of that car for so long. Possessions, man. That was the Buddha I had to kill. This is my vice: knowing when to let go. Because in the end... whatever decays only opens up room for new growth...
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"Defiled or immaculate. Dirty or pure. These are concepts we form in our mind. A rose we have just cut and placed in our vase is pure. A garbage can is the opposite. But that is only when we look on the surface. If we look more deeply, we will see that in just five or six days, the rose will become part of the garbage. We do not need to wait five days to see it. If we just look at the rose, and we look deeply, we can see it now. And if we look into the garbage can, we see that in a few months its contents can be transformed into lovely vegetables, and even a rose. If you are a good organic gardener, looking at a rose you can see the garbage, and looking at the garbage you can see a rose. Roses and garbage inter-are. They need each other very much [...] The garbage is just as precious as the rose."
-Thich Naht Hanh, Peace is Every Step
