Once again, I love Norman Fischer‘s zen take on the lojong slogan for this week. He simplifies it into three words (on purpose? By accident?! Who knows, but I like the thematic consistency): turn things around.
Fischer says, “Where there’s confusion or pain in your life, make use of it instead of trying to get rid of it.” This isn’t to say we shouldn’t try to get out of bad situations. By all means, when we can, we should! But a lot of the time, we experience emotions that can’t just be shipped off or easily rectified. And that’s the stuff we can address through this lojong training.
Like I said last week, we severely limit ourselves when we allow three measly buckets to categorize our whole lives. It’s childish, really, to view everything as like, dislike, don’t care. We become kids who only want chicken fingers for dinner. We never try anything new, and miss out on so many things just because of whatever weird first reaction we might have to it.
In other words, we lose so much when we don’t branch out. So this slogan teaches us to lean into a little bit of discomfort so that we can find some roominess on the other side of our limiting reactions.
Fischer reminds us, “Our efforts to control the world to suit ourselves will ultimately be unsuccessful.” (UGH! Isn’t that the worst?!) And then we can become frustrated, and angry, and bitter at the world, seeing it as hostile and against us, feeling alone. But we can turn things around just by recognizing that we can’t control the world. And actually, sitting with these feelings for just a few moments gives us so much more room to grow. It gives us seeds that grow into virtue.
It feels so serendipitous that this post falls on Election Day. So many of us are hoping and praying mightily for a great national turnaround. And we are also simultaneously gripped in fear of what will happen if those hopes are dashed. (And not just hopes- truly terrifying situations for so many people who rightly worry their well-being, freedom, and whole lives will be threatened if we lose.)
I don’t know what will happen tonight. I don’t even know if we will know anything definitive tonight at all. But I feel a sense of grounded clarity in saying: no matter what, we can choose to work to turn things around. That is our work to do. Either way, we will have this work to do, and it will be just as needed and just as necessary in the world.
There is always an option to turn things around. There is always a possibility to cultivate seeds of virtue, no matter what. Let’s commit to that, yes?
