A few months ago, mail stopped coming to my house: no personal letters, bills, or even junk mail. I sought help at the post office on 14th St. — they sent me to the one on 23rd. The office on 23rd St. invited me to please call the United States Postal Service’s toll-free international customer-service number. A kind woman in India took down my complaint but never called me back. That’s it, I thought, I’m just not going to get mail ever again. I’ve slipped through a crack in the system and there’s nothing more to be done. Try to love your destiny, Paul.
Then, some six weeks later, about ten blocks from my apartment, I saw a woman delivering mail. I asked her if she knew who delivers to my building. “What’s your name?” she asked. I told her and she seemed startled. “When did you move?” she said. I told her I never moved (was this some sort of Kafka novel?) “Well I somehow thought you moved,” she said defensively. “So I stopped bringing you mail.” I was about to unload on her for making that executive decision based on absolutely nothing, but it suddenly occurred to me: why focus on the problem when the solution is right here? “So you’ll bring me my mail tomorrow?” I asked her. “Of course,” she said with a smile, and the next day she delivered six weeks’ worth of post.
There are always second chances. Maybe not every situation gets resolved as easily and elegantly as the postal dilemma I’ve just narrated, but my story is still a good metaphor for our suffering and how we somehow find an end to it. In any experience, there is always an endless “bureaucracy” of things that can and do go wrong. No matter how kind we try to make our words, there are infinite ways they can be misunderstood. No matter how much we work on our bodies, there are infinite aches and pains lurking in every corner of our physical experience. No matter how wholesome we try to make our intentions, the mind still calls up thoughts of anger or sadness that we cannot control. Chaos is the rule, not the exception, to our lives, and sometimes its hard not to feel that we are completely at its mercy.
But there are always second chances. Maybe there isn’t always one postal clerk who holds the key to the whole problem, but there is always one thread that unravels the fabric of pain and frustration we are feeling. No matter how complex your troubles seem, experience can only reach you through your mind, the past can only reach you through the present, and so it is that you always get the last move in deciding how you want to relate to your difficulties. Whatever opportunities seem to have been lost, you still have this moment — this moment, in which to replace attachment with true love, self-pity with compassion, envy with appreciation, and worry with inner strength. And though this life is short, there is always enough time to think in this way. There is, in short, enough time to be happy.
A lot of what makes us frustrated is that we don’t see life as the puzzle it is. In any puzzle, you can’t understand the parts without understanding the whole, and vice versa. We tend to get hung up on the parts, like frustrated children who can’t understand why one jigsaw piece doesn’t fit into all the others. In our relationships, for example, we get upset when we only find part of what we are looking for in another person. We think, “Well that’s it: this person has gotten me stuck,” and we push our partners to fit into everything we want to experience — which is to say, to be perfectly shapeless and undefined — rather than appreciating their edges and contours, appreciating them for who they actually are.
What we don’t see, in our frustration, is that more has yet to be revealed: every person we meet is bringing us some quality or lesson that can only be fully understood in time, after we have a greater sense of the whole picture. So a beautiful practice, I’ve found, is to remind myself when someone is frustrating me: “I’m upset because I don’t know where this piece goes yet.” Thinking in this way opens up space between the situation and how my mind is relating to it and reminds me that my happiness depends on my actions, no matter what has just happened. You can’t lose at a puzzle as long as you still have some faith that the pieces mean something, as long as you are still willing to learn something new about how they fit together.
Sometimes I think the most important thing in life — more important than worldly success or even spiritual attainment — is simply to live free of resentment. I have seen so many people lose the thread of their happiness because of resentment, and it’s true: sometimes it’s hard to see resentments as they are forming. Resentment is like a mold in damp weather, in that it can grow on nearly anything. Sometimes we take actions that seem healthy, like going to the gym or meditating or taking self-improvement classes, but the secret intentions behind these actions are resentful. A trip to the gym can be motivated by resentment about how out of shape you feel. Meditation can be motivated by resentment about how stressed out or discontent you feel. And the consequence of all these resentments is that the otherwise healthy actions we take only give us the sensation of always being at the start of a very long, hard road. A path based on struggle always leads to more struggle.
But there still is time to catch these resentments and uproot them. No matter how long you have been feeling as though you are going nowhere, no matter how much circumstances around you seem stuck or fruitless, you still always get the last word in deciding what your motivation for doing anything is. If you have to run a tiresome errand at the store, you can still tell yourself, “I’m doing this because it will feel good to take care of myself.” If you hate your job, you still can tell yourself, “I’m going to work because it will feel good to have enough money.” In other words, the content of the labor that past circumstances have forced on you matters much less than your present intention for that work. And as you begin to replace your resentments with thoughts of self-care, your problems will begin to disintegrate — not because you are some god who controls the fate of the universe, but because you are a human whose mind has the power to incline you to joy.
So whatever you are facing right now, remember to face it as a creator, not just a consumer, of your experience. If you find yourself getting discouraged, think of discouragement as a grenade someone has pulled the pin out of, and try to chuck it as far from you as you quickly can. You have the strength and the reflexes to do this, and more importantly, you have the time. Your heart’s desire hasn’t passed you by for good. You haven’t missed the delivery. As the old film noir title goes: the postman always rings twice.
Paul Weinfield 