One of the highlights of any retreat for me is the formal teaching, or Dharma talks that take place most evenings interspersed among some post supper practices. Considering what it is that inspired me to follow this path, and embark upon a journey I feel I have only just begun, put simply it must have been the quest for a different way. Another way. Not necessarily a gentler, or easier way, for I feel sure I would have come across this earlier were it either of those. But a different way, that might lead to a different destination (and knowing that it might not).
Sometimes life wakes us up abruptly. Like the din of an overly loud alarm clock at an unfeasibly early hour, a thoroughly unwanted interruption to that which we do most of the time – sleep. We are awoken from our slumbers with a start, and forced to confront those things we tend to push to the back of our mind, preferring instead to pursue transitory pleasures to alleviate the tense relationship we have with reality.
According to the man now often referred to as the Buddha, there are three forms of suffering we as human beings, are apt to come across. There is the pain of pain, related to our mortal nature and the fact that we have bodies that fail us. We cut ourselves, we suffer with aches and pains of the physical variety. We age, and seek assistance with our demise. This is closely related to the pain that change causes us. We are in flux. Any time and all the time. Nothing stands still. There is no such thing as ‘I’ or ‘me’ as we are changing from moment to moment. We lean towards the solid and the constant, but we must look far and wide, for nothing remains the same. We seek to bolster the sense we have of ourselves through performance and acquisition – I am because I do, I am that which I have. All this comes to nought. The self is a verb rather than a noun – we are in the process of being ourselves. This is hard for us to come to terms with. We, and those we care about are here only for a finite term.
The third source of our pain is the added extra we bring to the mix. That self inflicted suffering we cause ourselves through our hopeless attempts to deny, negate or doctor the truths of pain and impermanence. This is where we can sit for all our lives, unless we wake up and smell the proverbial coffee. Buddhist teachings urge us to understand the causes and conditions of our suffering, and to embrace it fully. This is where there appears a fork in the road – we can continue to push away the unshakeable reality or learn to live more comfortably alongside that which frightens or frustrates us.
I’ve had several wake up calls in the last six months; alarms I did not set. Without them, I might still be bumbling along, doing my own thing, half asleep. Endings and changes beset us. They strike at the most inopportune moments. Just as things seem to be going well. These are, if we choose to treat them as such, opportunities for something other than pain management and endurance. This is our chance to grow, emotionally and psychologically. When we awaken to the pain we face and the discomfort we feel, as we recognise our tendency to worsen matters through denial of our own fallibility, frailty and finitude and of the inevitability of suffering, frustration and dissatisfaction, this can become a springboard to different relationships, with ourselves, with others and with the world.
These harsh awakenings are times where we have two options – to be thrown into the depression that the full catastrophe of life offers us, or to begin to live life in the present, embracing life on life’s terms. Depression or ‘living death’ stems from our refusal to accept impermanence. We have a choice, at any point, to try another way – to give life a go, a day at a time, a moment at a time, a breath at a time. As the author of ‘Rowing without Oars’ described in the memoir recorded in her last days before death whilst living with a terminal illness – every second is a life. 
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