To Have And Have Not

I was thinking about life again and this morning I just kept thinking to myself, "Isn't life hard enough without us having to make it harder for each other?"

I was thinking about the people I have most admired in my life and I was trying to pin down what it was about them that I admired. It was that they were brave enough to be unapologetically themselves. They didn't try to be anybody they weren't. They embraced their own dorkiness and flawed humanity and somehow perfected themselves by it. It's like the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold leaf and resin, making something more beautiful out of the broken pieces than the original bowl. The technique is known as kintsuge. They even have a word for it in Japan, the concept of perfection in imperfection. Wabi sabi. I wondered what it would be like to apply that philosophy to ourselves.

One of the central ideas to Buddhism is the idea that we create our own suffering out of desire and ignorance. We make ourselves miserable with trying to be what we are not and wanting what we can't have, or if we get what we want, finding that it doesn't make us truly happy. We want so many things. To be loved, to be admired, to impress people, to project a certain image, etc. What's so ironic is that we tend to work against our own objectives when we try so hard. We put so much effort into trying to be someone special. What if we didn't have to be special? Isn't there a certain comfort in insignificance? And we treat love so often as something people have to be tricked into giving us. It's kind of heartbreaking when you think about it. You can never be content with yourself  for as long as you're convinced that you'll never be good enough.

So what if we didn't have to have external validation? What if we didn't have to be cool or special or rich or beautiful, etc to have a right to exist? What if just being the ordinary person you are was good enough? That's what I noticed about the people I admired. They'd accepted who they were and stopped stressing about it. It turns out it's a lot less work when you don't worry about what anybody else thinks of you. I mean, it doesn't mean just go out and do what  you want or settle for being a shitty person to the others around you, because let's face it, we need each other and we have to live together. It's just common sense to not want to make life any harder for ourselves and others than it has to be. If we accept the premise that life is not fair, and that it applies to everyone, what right have we got to contribute to that unfairness?

Most of the time we have no idea what's going on with other people, so it might be more compassionate to lighten up on each other a little bit and forgive one another our failings. I figure if I don't jump all over someone else for making a mistake maybe they'll return the favor when I make one. All of the people I have ever known who tried to be someone they weren't were perfectly miserable. They didn't have any real friends and they took their problems out on everybody who got close to them. They wanted love but they worked against themselves with their anxiety about controlling everything including how others perceive them. When you're faking it and you build a relationship on that, you're setting yourself up for failure. The thing is, so many people are desperately afraid that if they were ever themselves nobody could love them. They're too scared to be who they really are and it keeps them from ever having a real relationship with anyone. They think we have to be perfect, but what if we aren't? What if we can never be? Maybe "perfect" is the enemy of "good enough".

And it occurs to me that life isn't a competition. It's not a game at all, in fact. Everybody we meet is a person with their own life and their own problems. Competing is bullshit. What do you get if you win, anyway? If you end up winning and not having any friends, isn't that kind of empty? At the end of our lives, does it matter how cool we were or how pretty? You can't make a life out of those things. Better to work together and make a world where we don't have to live like it's every man for himself, because quite frankly it sounds pretty lonely in the winner's circle. The whole concept of competition sounds a little antisocial to me, like a world run according to game theory. Who would want to live in such a world? Maybe we don't all have to be winners. Maybe it really isn't necessary to be better than anyone except perhaps in our behavior. God, if we could only compete at that, what a world it could be.