One of Those Days

Today is one of those days. I've spent five minutes staring at the blank Blogger window, unable to put two coherent sentences together. There's a rift in the world, it feels like, and I can see the gaps in the fabric of what is, the holes in the logic of my own existence. The Buddhists say this -- this sense of being off balance, of confusion and uncertainty -- is the fundamental ground of being. So they tell you to sit still inside of it, to learn to stay with it, and then it gets -- not better, but familiar. You get to know it. You get to see it differently once you know it, and notice a spaciousness about it, an openness, freedom. It sounds beautiful. And right. But the practice of it -- oh, it sucks. It chafes and itches and constricts your throat and makes your stomach churn with anxiety. A headache starts circling your head, smelling blood. And then you come back again to that question -- the circle completes itself again, snake mouth d swallowing snake tail -- of whether or not life is worth living. All the marvelous books you were planning to read, whose marvelousness and wisdom used to comfort you, seem jokes played on you by more intelligent minds than yours; how can they possibly imagine that they can cover up this gaping mouth of darkness that stands just in front of you, the meaninglessness of all that is? All the things that used to give you pleasure -- the morning light, a cold glass of water, the smell of a chimney fire -- have an ashy, crumbling feel to them. You wonder that you were ever blind and ignorant enough about what the world really is to have enjoyed them yesterday, and the day before, and the year before. So you sit on the couch, unable to do anything because nothing seems worthwhile doing, and you wait for this wound in the world to close and become scarred over, like all wounds do. You know that it will -- an hour or a day or a week later. And you're glad about that. Soon you'll be again on solid ground, going about your business without obsessively questioning its meaning, reading and doing laundry and making dinner and talking with your best friend as if they were the most natural things in the world, as if they made perfect sense. Unaccountably, though, you also feel sorry about it. For you have this nagging feeling that the Buddhists are right, that it would help to stay inside this groundlessness and poke around in its corners with good-natured curiosity. You know you'll come back to it, so you might as well have a good look around. It might not ever feel like home, but it might get to be a place where it's tolerable to say for a while, a room in the mansion of many apartments of your life.