The Unbearable Moment

Life can be shitty at times and there’s nothing you can do about it, nor do you need to

“Being as I am in an emotional place right now where I left something that gave me a sense of purpose, I have been delving into non-duality again. Am reading one of

Joan Tollifson

’s books. And I think what trips me up is that non-duality promises, or we think it does, some sort of antidote from feeling terrible pain, compulsions, addictions, the desire to end it all. It gives you the peace you so desire. And it does. Or at least it says it does.

I think the biggest issue of all is having the mind try to boggle everything up and perfect it. Now the NEW thing is you have to be authentic or aware and if you’re not then shame on you! Then one loses the looseness you had once of being a child. No fussing. Just being yourself. Solutions and changes come when they may. There’s no antidote to the occasional shittiness of life.”

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The teacher’s voice droned in the background as the sound of chalk repeatedly hitting the chalkboard provided the percussion -something to do with proving the congruence between two triangles - my head rested on folded arms upon my desk, my eyes gazing vacantly at the empty courtyard which shimmered like a mirage in the blistering South Indian heat. It’s a strange feeling - not wanting to be here nor there, or anywhere. But that’s how I felt.

I loathed having to sit in the suffocating classroom - 40 students strong, lacking any draft save for two ceiling fans that circulated at an excruciating pace, and my Mathematics teacher; a woman who sounded like she had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day since infancy. It was one thing to have to endure listening to math theorems. It was quite another to have them croaked at you. Yet, the option to leave and go outdoors felt just as bleak…

As an adult I often forget what soul-crushing boredom feels like and how many hours of it I had to endure as a child. And I often forget with what a profound degree of matter-of-factness I simply accepted the shittiness of my circumstances. I didn’t have a YouTube video I could watch that would promise me a different life if I only did A, B and C. I didn’t have a spiritual book I could pick up that would teach me some revolutionary technique to transcend my condition. It did not even occur to me that there was any option other than to simply endure the unbearable moment. My only solace was the knowledge that eventually that bell would ring and I’d have about five minutes of release and respite before the next hour-long mind-rape began.

Day in and day out, we endured this as kids. Perhaps, some of you enjoyed school. I hated it. Especially, because in India, where I grew up, all knowledge was accumulated by rote-learning: a form of education that sacrifices natural intellectual curiosity for information processing power, critical thinking abilities for mechanical analytical skills. Your mind is intubated, and you are force-fed knowledge so inhumanely, that you develop a gag reflex towards learning altogether.

If I reflect on my childhood, I endured more misery than I think I could bear to now. Mind-numbing boredom at school, emotional tension and turmoil at home, power games with the other boys constantly jostling for leverage within the social dominance hierarchy. I had the heart of a poet and yet most of my attention and energy was spent simply trying to survive the day.

One of the biggest downfalls of the self-help culture is that it has robbed us of the ability to simply resign ourselves to our fates. With its promises of empowerment, it has handicapped us. We are so convinced that we have the ability to change that we no longer have the capacity to endure. If you placed me in a crowded and over-heated classroom today and asked me to endure eight hours of mind-numbing lecturing, I couldn’t do it. I have grown too accustomed to my freedom - to stay or to leave the various circumstances I find myself in at will, if I find them unbearable.

Back then I didn’t have a choice. And it was that choicelessness that, in a paradoxical way, empowered me to accept the unbearable moments of my life. For what else could I do?

You are right. There is no antidote to life. The shittiness is meant to feel shitty. And yet, we have convinced ourselves, as a culture, that if a moment feels shitty and unbearable that means it needs to be fixed. Either something external needs to change or something internal does. But simply allowing it to feel shitty is not an option. That is the fundamental premise of all self-help and spirituality:

“Life is suffering. But it shouldn’t have to be. Here’s what you can do about it…”

The problem isn’t that life is shitty at times. The problem is that we have convinced ourselves that it shouldn’t have to be.

Why shouldn’t life sometimes be shitty? And why shouldn’t we sometimes feel shit about it?

Yes, the shit can be a burden. But an even bigger burden is the feeling that one has to be responsible for perpetually managing that shit and converting it into positive experiences.

That is like attempting to pull debris out of a constantly flowing river. While, standing in a river you may, every once in a while, get knocked over by a stray branch or piece of trunk floating by. But imagine if you convinced yourself that there shouldn’t be debris in the river and you set about attempting to remove every piece of it that came your way. What a neurotic way to live!

But that is exactly what spiritual teachings and self-help have done to people. Turned them into self-obsessed and neurotic characters so hyper-focused on their own private psychological experiences, and the incessant micromanagement of the same, that they have lost sight of what living is about. We are so entranced by the illusion of choice and the magnitude of agency we believe we possess to impact the trajectories of our lives that we have inadvertently traded in the one freedom that is each and every one of our birthrights. The freedom to be.

Sitting there with my head on my desk… the unbearable heat, the unbearable boredom, the unbearable rasp of the teacher’s voice grating on my senses…there was no resistance within me. Just a calm matter-of-fact resignation. As I gazed vacuously into the void that was the naked searing sky, I noticed some dancing points of light in my vision. Like luminous pinpricks, they moved in a haphazard manner around one another. And the more I focused on them, the more of these points of light appeared, just as stars begin to fill a night sky as your eyes adjust to the darkness, until hundreds of them filled my vision. I spent the hour watching the little lights dance in amusement…

The little joys. The small amusements. These were enough to content me back then. I wasn’t seeking some grand liberation from my suffering. Even a simple moment that brought a smile to my face made the unbearable hour worthwhile.

We take too much for granted. The little joys, the small amusements, fall short. They are worthless to us. We want to be blissed out of our socks. We want to laugh so hard our souls escape our bodies. We want to feel so empowered it makes us rock hard.

Those who claim to be suffering…answer me this - how much of your days are actually spent suffering? There are moments of sadness, there are moments of frustration, there are moments of disappointment and moments of anxiety, sure. But how many more moments pass you by in your days that are none of those things? How many more moments are so mundane as to be entirely unremarkable? How many more moments transpire with hardly an acknowledgement?

We tend to think in absolutes - so, if we’ve had a shitty hour, we might say we’ve had a shitty day. If we’ve had a shitty month, we might say we’ve had a shitty year. And if we’ve had a string of unfortunate events occur in our lives, we may just round up for good measure by saying that our “life sucks”.

The shittiness is meant to feel shitty. Suffering is meant to feel miserable. And that’s ok. That’s part of the setup we are signed up for. There’s nothing wrong with the setup. It just is.

And there is no way of making the shittiness enjoyable either. That just creates a positive bias. Positive affirmations are the equivalent of putting pearls on a pig. You may convince yourself that the pig is a beautiful lover - that is, until it goes ‘Oink!’

The reality is life is the whole of it. Love, grief, joy, sadness, excitement, fear, flow, pain, humour, tragedy - that’s the setup. Love will fulfill, heartbreak will hurt, joy will exhilarate, pain will suck, peace will relax and fear will aggravate. No one is exempt from this.

If I had to sum up the human experience in five words, it would be:

Have fun, feel shit, die.

That’s basically how it goes. And there really isn’t much more to it. Everything else is an overlay. A narrative. A story we weave in order to give our lives meaning.

But if you were to truly look at the lives of human beings, the one common thread amongst each and every one of them is:

They had fun. They felt shit. They died.

Whether a pauper or a prince, whether a Nobel laureate or a buffoon, whether an adult or a child, whether a Buddha or a bum.

Each one of them had fun, felt shit, and died.

Does it really need to mean much more than that?

No matter how you answer, it won’t impact that dynamic.

Because no matter how miserable you are determined to be, you cannot avoid moments of joy. They will come unbidden and hijack you when you least expect it. I have seen grieving family members laugh uproariously even while the body of their loved one lies fresh in the casket.

And no matter how happy you are determined to feel, you cannot avoid moments of unhappiness. They also will come unexpectedly and drain the color from the moment.

Finally, no matter how long you manage to put it off, the end will come. This lifetime will end. And no one will care or even remember how much your own happiness and suffering mattered to you.

This may sound depressing to hear, but I personally find it freeing.

It’s freeing to perceive life as such a simple dynamic.

It’s freeing not to feel responsible for “managing” life and its outcomes, and perpetually attempting to force the needle towards the positive.

It’s freeing to witness the moments oscillate easily between joy and suffering like the swinging pendulum of a clock.

It’s freeing to let joy be joyful, pain be painful, fear be fearful and misery be miserable.

It’s freeing not to have to ‘do’ anything about it.

It’s freeing just to let life live through me.