Life Doesn’t Always Go As Planned

So I’m taking a Buddhist meditation class on an off-and-on basis to help me reduce stress. When I first started attending the class, I didn’t really think it would help. I just figured the classes would provide me with plenty of blogging material. An abundance of blogging material makes me feel somewhat less stressed out. I like being able to wake in the morning and say, “Self, I totally already know what I’m going to write about today. Today will be a good day.”

I do believe in meditation, though. I believe in it a lot. I believe it helps other people. I just didn’t think it would help me. I’m what you might call a lost cause. My genetic lineage includes millions of hopeless worriers. My people have elevated complaining and doom and gloom to an art form. If you don’t believe me, just hang out for a while with my family of origin on a rainy day.

Bad weather is like a cancer in my family. It gets blown completely out of proportion. Rain is an excuse to stay in bed all day long and moan, “Poor me. The universe is out to get me. Why doesn’t anything ever go right for me?”

Seriously.

Anyway, lately I’ve had a lot more than the weather dragging me down. In no particular order, the list of worries in my head have to do with the economy, a nagging health problem, my messy house, a to-do list than never actually gets done, global warming, orphaned elephants in Africa, and world hunger. Oh and there’s the never-ending mathematical calculation that runs through the back of my mind regarding whether my karma bank account is in the black or the red. And there’s the bad luck that I may have absorbed from getting the short end of a wishbone last week.

And mercury is about to go into retrograde. That’s never good.

My husband, mind you, has no such worries. He’s one of those “if I need money, the universe will magically bring it to me” type people. Actually, more accurately, his life view is more like, “If I need money, my wife will earn it.”

It’s annoying.

But last week, I actually found myself asking him, “How exactly do you manage to live in the moment?” He looked up from his newspaper and said, “I don’t know.”

And then he started reading his newspaper again, because he was in the moment and I was interrupting his Zen.

“Can you teach me?” I asked, “Because you’re really good at it and we both know that I suck at it.”

“I don’t know. I think it’s just something you are born with,” he said.

He was no help, so I decided that this week should be an on week for meditation class.

And that’s where I found myself last night.

The class always starts with a breathing meditation. Usually, I sleep through this part, but last night my mind was pretty active. My thoughts were along the lines of, “Hey I don’t think I’m going to fall asleep this time. And I’m actually paying attention to my breathing and I am not thinking. Wait? That was thinking. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. That was good. Stop thinking. But I just was saying. Stop it. You know this one time at band camp… [long interlude of thoughts]

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. This other time at band camp…”

Then the nun told us we could open our eyes. She talked a lot about the causes of stress, saying that our deluded minds tend to get attached to certain people and outcomes. She said that happiness comes from within. She told me that I don’t need things, prestige and money to be happy. I don’t need things to work out to be happy. I don’t need anything to be happy. I could be homeless and still be happy, she said.

She mentioned that we often worry about other people’s reactions because we have a deluded attachment to being accepted and liked. She said that we get attached to our to-do lists and feeling productive. We get attached to comfort. We get attached to other people.

We get attached to life going as planned.

But life rarely goes as planned.

For some reason that was a huge revelation for me, because I assumed I was the only person whose life didn’t go as planned. I thought everyone else’s life went exactly how they wanted it. Their cars never died unexpectedly. Their daycares never called and said they were sending all of the kids home because of the snow. Their computers never crashed at precisely the worst time ever for such a thing to happen.

And they never had bad weather that wrecked everything.

That only happened to me.

Or so I thought.

As soon as I realized that life didn’t go as planned for anyone, the stress that was inside of me just melted away.

“Fine,” I said. “Life is whatever it is. Whatever happens is what happens. It’s all good.”

And that’s how I still feel about it, even though it’s raining.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tagged as: Happiness advice, meditation