A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (20 page)

But as we listen carefully for this next right thing, it is good for us to remember we are not necessarily seeking something we do not already have. The very practice of seeking can sometimes presume we are not where we need to be, and that whatever we have right now, or whomever we are this minute, cannot possibly be enough.

Finding the next right thing is a subtle dance of both seeking and finding, of simultaneously reaching for and allowing in. The world is eternally engaged in living rhythms between joy and sorrow, scarcity and abundance, suffering and grace, just as our lives are filled to overflowing with people and things at times broken and whole, happy and sad, dormant and blossoming, dying and being born.

It is not a question of whether the glass is half full or half empty. When the Buddha taught that we would each experience
ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows in a human life, he was saying the glass is always half full
and
half empty. The trick to finding our way, step-by-step, is first to see the whole world just as it is, neither broken nor whole. Then, as fully present and awake as we are able, we step into the ongoing, living, growing, evolving relationship between what our hearts can recognize and what the world can show us.

I was walking with an old friend along a path that meandered through an old forest in northern New Mexico. He was struggling with a difficult problem in his church and hoped I could help find some way to solve this painful dilemma. Deep in serious conversation, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a sign placed by the forest service next to a ponderosa pine, a strong, tall, and familiar tree on these high-desert hikes.

I stopped and walked over to the sign, which described the tree, the altitude at which it thrived, its height, and finally that the bark smelled like vanilla. I thought, well, I have walked through these forests of ponderosa pine for decades and have never smelled anything like vanilla. But when I put my nose into the deep crevice in the pine bark, and took a deep inhale, I involuntarily jumped back and shouted at my out-of-town companion, “You have to smell this!” Not only was it unmistakably vanilla, but it was as if the tree were drenched in it. It is, I learned, one source of the vanilla extract we use in the kitchen.

Just then, a swarm of children who had run ahead of their family caught up with us. They were busily sniffing each tree and loudly proclaiming its flavor. They taught us that if we scratched the bark with a sharp stone, we would get more fragrance. They were right. There, in the middle of hundred-year-old trees, we
were smelling, screaming, calling out to one another: “Vanilla! Cookies! Chocolate! Cinnamon!”

For all time, the ponderosa bark had been emitting these fragrances, and I had never noticed. What had changed? I had been awakened to something right in front of me, literally surrounding me. It was not the trees that had changed but my perception of them, an awareness of something I didn’t know existed. But I know for the rest of my life that a walk through the ponderosa will be forever blessed with the impossible fragrance of cookies.

How many times, in the rush and hurry of our important work and hectic lives, are we so driven by our search for happiness that it is impossible for us to ever find it, because we literally rush past the very fragrance of happiness that surrounds us everywhere? How do we learn to feel the truth of whatever is here before us? While
seeking
is an essential human practice, seeking without finding is mere suffering. When we go about our work, and finally solve an intractable problem, how often do we step back, allow ourselves a long exhale, celebrate, give thanks, honor that something broken has been made whole, and invite others to join us in lifting up a moment of something made whole?

So we are seekers, and we are finders. What happens when we stop long enough to notice the beauty of what has grown where we have planted? Not all our relationships, tasks, projects, dreams, or people we love are in mortal danger. In a common trance of our imagined indispensability, we can grow to believe that the fate of the galaxy rests ultimately and always on our shoulders. Yet somehow all graceful natural life—plants, trees, sky, birdsong, morning dew, sunset, honeysuckle—seem
to grow and prosper without our immediate emergency intervention. What if we take one whole, entire day—a Sabbath, if you will—and do nothing at all useful, but notice instead the glory of poetry, nature, music, fragrance of rose and fresh mowed grass, moonlight, hands touching hands, laughter, long naps, hot chocolate, and cold ice cream? What if we find refuge in friends and lovers; what if we stop moving and listen? If we dare taste, touch what is beautiful and alive right here now, the sudden realization of our ridiculously abundant wealth might just flood our senses with sensual delights beyond imagining.

Everything—the smell of cookies in the trees, the fragrance of earth after a thunderstorm, the color of the sunset, the feel of warm water in summer—are all gifts. As both seekers and finders, we learn to take a more accurate inventory of this fullness that populates our life and appreciate the whole truth of who we are, the complete richness of what we have, and the whole picture of what we have planted, grown, and harvested. Only then can we rest, having taken confident measure of the unimaginable totality of what we have received in this precious human life.

A Good Night’s Sleep

Happiness, it seems to me, consists of two things: first, in being where you belong and second—and best—in comfortably going through everyday life, that is, having a good night’s sleep and not being hurt by new shoes
.

THEODOR FONTANE

O
ne of the most common casualties of feeling pressured to get more and more done, as we desperately try to get “caught up,” is what used to be known as “a good night’s sleep.”

Today the phrase seems antiquated, a leftover from some long-forgotten era. “I’ll have plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead” encapsulates our prevailing sentiment regarding our inconvenient biological requirement to spend literally hours of nonproductive time in some useless state of sleep. When some people announce how little sleep they need or were able to squeeze into their schedule, they do so with some perverse sense of pride or moral superiority. One’s need for sleep seemingly reveals an essential lack of character, a personality deficit, a sign of weakness and lack of competitiveness.

Studies at the University of Westminster, and regularly corroborated by others, show that most people benefit most from an average of 8.1 hours of sleep per night. Yet in 2008, the Centers
for Disease Control reported that the number of Americans getting less than five or six hours of sleep a night has steadily increased over the last two decades, leaving fewer people feeling well-rested. While more of us seem to wear this increase in time for our important work and productivity as evidence of our strength and fortitude, the essential biological requirements of our body’s need for rest are not quite flexible enough to satisfy these whims and preferences of the workplace.

The simple truth is this: The less we sleep, the more fragile and ineffective we become—by nearly every conceivable measure. Decreasing our sleep by as little as an hour a night can cause us to lose as much as 32 percent of our ability to pay attention at work. This also impairs memory and cognitive ability—our capacity to think clearly and process information correctly. Decrease in sleep increases by twofold the probability of our injuring ourselves or someone else, and it impairs our concentration and peripheral vision to the point that we cause as many automobile deaths as drunk drivers.

People who regularly get less than six or seven hours of sleep each night suffer a substantial increase in mortality risk—higher than that caused by smoking, high blood pressure, or heart disease. It even contributes to obesity, anger, and depression.

Biologically, lack of sufficient sleep significantly suppresses the immune system. My friend Trevor Hawkins is a well-respected AIDS physician and research scientist who has been studying the intricate complexity of the immune system for the past twenty years. When we first spoke about my writing this book, he told me that in the stress of our overwork, lack of sleep, pushing and striving without ever knowing what is enough, when we don’t take sufficient time to rest, our
immune system is perpetually “lit up.” This taxes the immune system, weakening its ability to recognize and fend off disease, and makes us more susceptible not only to HIV and AIDS but to all other opportunistic infections. He added that our exhaustion that results from a constantly over-amped, overactive immune system, on high alert 24/7, decays our overall health, well-being, and fundamental immunity of our bodies over time.

Finally, those of us who do push and drive ourselves until we are slowed or stopped by some illness or disease often take comfort in knowing that the medicines and health care available to us in the United States are a kind of safety net. We can lean into the reassurance that if we are briefly taken down by some serious infection, illness, or disease, we will at least be assured that we will receive some of the best possible treatment in the world, so we can be back on our feet and back at our work.

In fact, nothing can be farther from the truth. Of the top nineteen wealthiest, most industrialized, modern Western countries in the world, the United States ranks dead last in curing preventable disease. We are at the absolute bottom of the list, behind France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Interestingly, in spite of well-established myths about national health care, people in the United States die of preventable diseases at a far greater rate than in every single nation with any form of national health care.

My point is not to argue the merits of respective health care systems. Instead, it is to shake us awake into listening more deeply, watching more closely, the kinds of choices we make about our time, our work, our rest.

Our choice is this: Each day, we must decide whether seriously risking our health, our clarity—literally risking our life—is an honest reflection of our heart’s deepest belief that we will find our most reliable peace and contentment in getting a little closer to the bottom of our to-do list, rather than in the simple elegance of a good night’s sleep.

Gratefulness and Acceptance

God, Grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change; courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference
.

REINHOLD NIEBUHR, “The Serenity Prayer”

B
efore we can accept things as they are, we must first learn to
see
things as they are. How often have we caused ourselves unnecessary suffering by seeing things, people, relationships, jobs—even ourselves—as we hoped they were, rather than how they really were? How often, some time later, when the real truth about the person or situation was revealed, have we been hurt and disappointed, and angry with ourselves for not following our intuitive sense of what we knew was true all along?

There is precious little to be gained, and much to lose, by seeing things as we wish them to be; still, it is a seductive habit and difficult to break. How can we not, when we’re offered a seemingly good job or we find someone attractive who is also attracted to us, ignore the warning signs that, in our heart’s inner knowing, are flashing desperately to warn us of impending danger? How often do we talk ourselves out of our own
intuitive wisdom, dismissing the more painful truths we see so clearly, denying their significance, only to discover that we would have fared better had we listened to what we already knew, in secret, was essentially wrong, defective, or inappropriate for our deepest soul’s desire?

On the other hand, sometimes we are given things we simply must accept, things we neither choose nor desire, yet must somehow make peace with. If we have cancer, it is foolish to pretend we do not. If we lose our job, we cannot ignore the need to reassess our financial well-being. If death takes someone we love, it merely increases our anguish to imagine that they may still somehow be alive.

I had many friends who died when they were quite young, in their twenties, thirties, and forties, some through illness, others by random violence. Many others had or currently have cancer, lupus, Crohn’s disease, and countless other physical challenges and difficulties. Beloved friends have lost their children to illness and accidents. I have, through the grace of God and the help of innumerable friends, somehow survived three life-threatening illnesses.

With each loss, illness, or tragedy, I inherit the same ache in my heart—torn between anger, denial, grief, and acceptance. This is how we are made. Our hearts get broken open by love and loss, and we often spend long months agonizing, with wildly different feelings and responses. But in the end, the one reliable path to peace and serenity involves some practice of rigorous, honest acceptance of what is simply, inarguably true. If I deny it, try to prove to myself it isn’t true, all I produce is suffering, in myself and others. It is only when I
fully and unconditionally accept what has been given, what has been taken, is there any possibility of healing. The magic, the blessing, the toy in the cereal box, the surprise at the end of this heart-wrenching pilgrimage of deeply honest acceptance, is that it begins, over time, to turn into gratefulness.

When begrudging acceptance slowly becomes a full-hearted, honest, loving acceptance, some uncontrollable, unpredictable alchemy invariably has its way with us, as we begin to feel grateful. Yes, we can practice it, try saying it, journaling, or writing about it, and these are all good and useful tools. But the truth is that acceptance simply becomes gratitude.

Make no mistake: Gratitude does not come swiftly or easily, nor does it in any way erase the searing grief of the loss, the pain, or the fury at the injustice. It merely invites something beautiful, fresh, and new to grow and flourish right beside it. The deaths of too many friends, finally accepted, becomes a solid foundation that absolutely defines my sense of time—how precious it is, how short, how quickly taken away. I am astonished daily, impossibly grateful for this day.