As I understand it, Buddhist philosophy defines unhappiness as desiring what one can't have and getting what one doesn't want. The gorgeous prom queen who is already going steady with the star quarterback would be one example of the former, while a case of poison ivy illustrates the latter.
The idea is to stop desiring the unattainable and make terminal peace with deprivation or, alternately, to accept the discomfort of a natural occurrence and shut up about it.
It sounds to me like the Rolling Stones' lyric You can't always get what you want. Or as Johnny Desmond memorably sang: You've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative ...
Not much of an expert in Buddhism, having heretofore not being particularly interested in it, I nevertheless set myself to the task of digging out notes taken more than 50 years ago in a graduate school course in that Asian religion. The impulse for the excavation came over me as I sought some philosophical equilibrium to help me process a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer.
Until I began treatment at one of the finest cancer centers in North America in the care of one of the top physician-researchers in the field of prostate cancer, I was somewhat shaken. Many years ago, I watched my mother die an excruciating death from stomach cancer. I remember as well those men in the congregations I have served over the years, who succumbed to the disease I now have.
My own worry was not so much the pain I might suffer as it was a more or less immediate possibility of leaving those I love so very much. At the top of that list are my wife of nearly 35 years and my four children, two daughters-in-law, a son-in-law and four grandchildren with a fifth on the way -- not that I think I am indispensable but, rather, part of a set that my sooner-than-later death would break up in an untimely fashion.
Yet when I received an optimistic prognosis and yielded to the reality that some of the inconveniences common to any kind of cancer and its treatment would be mine, I found myself in what one might call a Zen place for quite the first time in my life.
In that state and the general attitude it brings about, I was enabled freely to accept the most obvious of all facts, viz. that at 75 I was closer to my death than to my birth. Even if I were to live to be 100, my health would naturally have been in deterioration for some time, no doubt to a point that would cause me actually to welcome death. To have been able to countenance that without trepidation remains a sublime happiness.
That is not to say I have given up on my treatment. On the contrary, I have embraced it fully and participate in it with enthusiasm. I am trusting the prognosis but am fully aware that circumstances beyond the control even of the best physicians could alter its optimism at any time. To be able to own the writing of those words is a release of a kind that might pass muster with a Buddhist spiritual director, had I one.
One of the untestable doctrines of theistic Christianity (perhaps there is no other kind) is that true believers can live forever through participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which participation is said to come of immersion in the church's sacramental life or a person's belief in Jesus' salvific martyrdom.
Either notion seems to me to be threadbare of probability and commonsense. I can understand why life after death -- a very strange oxymoron, by the way -- was the desideratum of many to whom I tried to be a pastor, but I could not affirm the hope they had for personal immortality.
Long since, I had come to see that such vain hopes as resurrection and eternal life take the edge off concern for the here-and-now and for what we who are able can and ought to be doing to make the most of the life we have, especially with the needs of others in mind.
Thus have I been making myself busy of late spending time with family and friends, reaching out to others who are and have been important in my life -- that by way of saying "thank you" and enjoying who they are and I am right now. I continue with renewed vigor my volunteer work at a nonprofit social service agency that serves the poor of Detroit. I look forward to be able to do all that for a long time to come, while acknowledging that, for me, all of it in due course will come to an end.
That makes the sound of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 12 -- just now playing on the speakers of the computer upon which I am composing this essay -- all the more satisfying as I know that one day when I turn to it again will be the last time I do so.
Each of us will do something for the last time but will probably not be aware that it is the last time. Were circumstances to make us thus aware, the immediacy of the moment would be endowed with a profound sense of the here-and-now.
The here-and-now is all any of us can legitimately desire. Happiness comes from embracing it for all it's worth while accepting that it is only here and only now as long as here and now last.
Is it possible to interpret the Rolling Stones' lyric You can't always get you want to mean that you can have whatever "it" is you want, but not always -- as in forever?