We learn new things about ourselves daily but the snippets of wisdom get easily buried beneath other things that steal our attention.

These tiny little 'aha' realizations are chucked away as we go about the business of taking care of real life stuff, such as pretending not to have lost our minds when a giant truck nearly annihilates our existence while on the road, juggling manual dish-washing with online gossip-reading or practicing not getting little things upset us and then failing to do just that as we dive into a verbal war zone that scares the bejeebers our of ourselves and others within hearing distance.

Life's not really a box of chocolates when it comes to the part when we have no choice but to look at it square in the eye and learn that there are facades of ourselves that we don't comprehend or even like and when others reveal that they too are not that different, we find comfort in our mutual perception of incompleteness.

Reality does pull us back to the ground everyday and when the gritty raw aspect of living grab us by our posterior, we get scared. I get awfully scared. Knowing the that non-attachment is key to non-suffering isn't the same as practicing it as we suffer. It's not hearts and roses. It wasn't meant to be painless.

But for some reason, we self-delude. Together we do it and for a while, it appears like the real thing. That we're all immortal. Invincible. That there's something grand waiting on the other side, either way. Or, something worse.

There's an old game that people play where they believe with all the strength of their hearts that the good will triumph and the bad will suffer. As if the good happens to just be and must be elevated and the bad is destined for nothing else except to be forever doomed.

People aren't cardboard characters of some poorly-constructed TV show. We can be ruthlessly 'bad' and also have the capacity for bursts of kindness. We can be selflessly good even as we carry flashes of the so-called seven sins within us.

Why don't we embrace and extend our understanding of the complexity of all humanity instead of molding it compulsively to fit a unicorn of a concept that we have been mistakenly taught.

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shanaz@RS | 5:36 AM | Labels: buddhalicious