Equanimity or Bust

There's no romance in equanimity. The quality of being at ease with whatever comes one's way seems to be in opposition to our desire for excitement and drama. We want passion, conflict, and speed, almost as much in our lives as we want them in movies and on TV.

A writer once mused that it was impossible to compose a story about a happy man, because plot can't co-exist with contentment. He contended that a satisfied protagonist doesn't yearn, fight, or strive; therefore, anything you write about him will be just a tedious anecdote. Story needs movement. Equanimity, on the other hand, is stillness.

Much of our lives consist of struggle. If you're reading this, you have Internet access and leisure time. You're also privileged to have (here I make assumptions) easy access to clean water, adequate food, and a place to call home. Unless you live in a war zone, you probably have no dire existential concerns. Your day-to-day might even afford time for music and art. If so, lucky you.

The wealthy have all of their basic needs met. They don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. They don't need to fear (depending on how they got their wealth) being murdered in their sleep. They can easily afford clothes appropriate to the season. They are also, according to studies, generally dissatisfied. Without existential struggles, significant friction, and narrative interest to contend with, they get bored. Money can't buy happiness, as someone once said, but it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.

It's arguably easier to be equanimous in the absence of excessive difficulty. Study after study shows us that a person regularly faced with moderately difficult challenges will report being happier than somebody living a life of ease. I would argue that this is exactly the thing that the pampered Prince Siddhartha Gautama felt, gazing beyond the walls of his family's palace, before he ventured out on the quest that led him to become the Buddha, an icon of equanimity.

I understand why it's said that following the Eightfold Noble Path—practicing Buddhism, that is—constitutes a different way of being in the world. It changes your life, reveals the impossibility of an independent self in a universe structured upon interconnectivity.

This concept, no-self, is tricky but perhaps best illustrated with the koan "What was your face before your parents were born?" Everything we think we are depends on the existence of everything else. In a world without our mother and father, where can we be said to exist? Our existence depends on them, and on so much else. How much can be taken away from who we believe we are before we aren't us anymore? Are we our designer wardrobe? Our love of 1950s sci-fi movies? Our award-winning hot sauce recipe? Our career as a hospice nurse?

Meditation is the study of the self. To study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to become one with the universe. I'm no Zen master, but I feel a teensy iota of this oneness when I sit in meditation. It's a little scary. How does one avoid the pitfall—which I can only imagine exists—of slipping not just into a state of nonidentification but of nonidentity? It's one thing to forget the self; it's another to be subsumed by a conception (however misguided) of selflessness. Maybe this is where a teacher comes in handy, but I don't have that luxury where I am.

Sometimes I see myself, in my meditation, seated at the precipice of a great void. Leaning forward, I'll tumble into nothingness, into an inconceivably vast absence of concepts or observable phenomena, wherein I'll know only stillness and imperturbability. Leaning backward, I'll tumble to meet the irrefutably solid ground of a phenomenological reality, a consciousness stuck in this gradually declining meat-machine that I call my body. Neither option feels comfortable, yet maintaining equipoise takes so much effort.

I don't want to become one of those frustratingly chill bodhisattva stereotypes, seemingly indifferent to everything going on around him and, in a word, boring as shit. Nor do I want to keep going through this life with the same hangups, limited perspectives, and stressors that have for so long defined who I am. Yet I wouldn't be practicing if I didn't welcome a change.

These are just the worries of someone who's unsure but trying, the expression of thoughts by someone walking a road he can't see. I guess that's everyone, though. I'm nothing special, just one projection of the steady breath and beating heart of the universe.