Learning Curve

In preparation for a milestone college reunion, my classmates and I were asked to reveal life lessons learned after university ones. Oddly the questionnaire did not allot much space.  Even though I found this all seriously ridiculous, I did start to think about life lessons learned: stuff a university never teaches. And what rushed to mind were those squishy truths you sit on hoping to squash, the ones you learn the hard way because they won't go away.  Here are the ones I can still remember. 

The Dharma teaches that all humans absolutely have Buddha Nature, but life teaches Buddha Nature can be wickedly difficult to imagine in some of those human beings.

Mother Nature is a comedian: aging brings wisdom at the same time as short term memory loss.

Learn from mushrooms. Plenty of people and policies that look glossy good on paper are actually poisonous in real life.

Evolutionary change is possible to see. The absolutely hands down scariest, worst drivers on the planet are no longer in New Jersey. They are all in California. The information highway has obviously not yet reached there. Everybody treats the left lane as the right one for sashaying at bicycle speed.

We all come with a lifetime guarantee. Like those complex Wall Street default packages, nobody knows its actual face value. 

Trungpa Rinpoche said the greatest luxury in life is to sit still while so many idiots are mindlessly running in circles chasing phantom ideas. Mary Oliver says water is so discontent, it is forever moving on to another spot while a rock, a rock is content to sit still and soak up the sun. This is welcome inspiration now that air travel has become the most widely used form of government sanctioned torture.

Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur in the booming mistake business. Most of us who've passed through middle age wish we'd known back then what we know now, but nobody still back there wants to hear what we could tell them.

If product liability and tort law had been adopted when God created men, he'd have been out of business in less than seven days.

Those who have the status will inevitably go nuclear to protect the status quo. (And there you have domestic violence, monopoly capital, the Saudi royal family and the Clinton campaign.) 

The most terrifying word of this new millennium isn't ISIS or Al-Qaeda. It's should. Struggling to conform to some vague and probably passing corporate marketing idea of how you or events or others should be rather than facing how you and they actually are unleashes the most terrifying, cancer causing stress. Trust me: You are far less likely to be blown away by some bearded Arab asshole than by your own terrifying suspicion you aren't good enough.

What the hell! is never the wrong answer. 

Never pass a chance to drink bubbly. Celebrate everything all the time. What's wrong with joy?

Humanity is divided between those who define the word "share" as a noun and those convinced it's a verb.

The best thing that can happen at college is to make friends who continue to be faithful friends for life because they liked you before you had any power to affect their ambition.That's how you can trust they really just plain like you.

People who go on big ego trips usually stop at every available food fetish.

God's ways remain mysterious. I have no clue why as I age, hair has permanently fallen from my eyebrows and forehead but not my legs.

Don't crow too loudly about human progress, especially in this self-congratulatory technological age.The people of Jericho built a wall that Joshua tore down. The Chinese built a great wall against the Mongols who  invaded anyway. The walled cities of southern France did not keep out the Romans or Brits. Now our answer to immigration in the age of gigabytes and space stations is to build a 2,000 mile long wall along the Mexican border.

If you live long enough, your hips and thighs do get thinner. This is because your waist expands wider than they are.

We live in what may seem the worst of times but testosterone has always been with us. We may actually be living in the best of times yet because we have more available antidotes. The Dharma message of compassion and self-control has become contagious around the planet. Last year 10,000,000 less animals were killed for dinner because we are changing how we eat. More people than before have begun to connect cause to effect. 

Everybody wants longevity. But nobody wants to be around those of us who have it. 

Like flowers, human beings are heliotropes. We always seek and respond happily to sunshine and warm temperament.

It's so much easier to blame others for what happens to you than to look in the mirror to see how you did that.

Modernity is trying to answer Henry Higgins question: Why can't a woman be more like a man? Buddhism is trying to address the Buddha's insight that men need to become more like women.

Back in college, we all wanted to change the world. We didn't realize what we meant was we wanted to make the world conform to our idea of how it should be or could be. We didn't know then what I know now: it's so much easier to want to change the world than to change yourself. That hard slog takes real courage, wisdom and warriorship. It's a day job, a night job, tenured position you can't resign. But you are the only thing you have the power change. Btw: Change yourself and you've changed the world. 

And finally, I do hate to contradict the Buddha but some things are just not impermanent. People still need to eat real food and get plenty of sleep. People still want to get married and have kids. Your bladder still doesn't care that you want to sleep through the night.  To thrive human beings still as always need lots of love, attention, physical safety and nourishing memories. So keep giving generously. The life you brighten will be your own.

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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