If only for once it were still.
If the not quite right and the why this
could be muted…
If all of it didn’t keep me from coming awake…
                             ~~~Rainer Maria Rilke, “If Only for  Once”
If only
we didn’t grow old
or die,
we would be
Forever 

still chanting “if only,
and “why this?”

It is our way
to long for Paris,
then need Rome.

Our way
To find
gold
and then 
need diamonds.

Our way 
to swim against the current,
to change the course of the river,
to run,
run
against the wind.
~~~~~~~~~

Most people live their lives in an incessant alternation between heaven and hell. Getting what they want, they are in heaven. Losing it, or never getting it at all, they drop to hell.  Hell is the stiff resistance to what is…Heaven is the opened heart. Hell is the tightened gut.  ~Stephen Levine, Who Dies, An Investigation into Conscious Living and Conscious Dying 

Levine talks about the preference machine that a person becomes.  We spend our lives seeking pleasure and happiness, running from discomfort and unhappiness, to approval from disapproval., to admiration, from failure. In our running from one side to the other, we exhaust ourselves. We become exhausted  by life.

Who is this who is never satisfied?

The “self. “The reason we are preference machines is that we cling to our idea of our “selves” so tightly.  As Levine explains, “Thinking in terms of ‘I’ and self-gratification, we live a life of stiff-armed hell, denying the process we share with all who exist…Most of the moments of satisfaction in our lives we cling to, making a temporary heaven into an increasing hell.”  Living to reach satisfaction—something we can’t seem to achieve– we set ourselves up for disappointment as a lifestyle.

As children we tried to understand who we were supposed to be, and so we made a story from the bits and pieces: the scowls, the smile, the annoyed parent, the overwhelmed parent trying to reach impossible goals. The child’s fragile, newly forming “self” created a story of why she seemed to cause adults to respond as they did—that something else or someone else was preferred. As time went on, any evidence that fit the story was filed away and added to the same basic story of people and things being “not good enough.” Since adults also appeared to be dissatisfied with who they were and what had, we followed their example of becoming preference machines ourselves.

Over the years I found it necessary to re-parent myself through therapy and various helpful groups, but the “self” I thought I was remained a constant. After all, I needed to have an identity and better a familiar dysfunctional identity than none at all.

The new story I was encouraged to tell myself was “I am now loveable, strong, invincible, etc.”  So, I tried to be more than human. That did not work. That was actually a child’s version of what a grown-up could be. Dismantling that story of “I” requires an adult to be in the room. 

The child is an observer who ingests what is set before it. The grown-up is a witness of what the child’s story of the ideal as the only acceptable identity. The adult becomes adept at undefining her identity. Not clinging to how she would prefer herself and life to be. She no longer is controlled by herself as a preference machine.

Zorba the Greek–from the movie of the same name– is a good example as he dances in the face of life as “the whole catastrophe.” Like Zorba, she accepts life’s changing partners. and dances to whatever song life is playing. Buddha would shake his booty with both of them.