Really? All we can do is keep breathing?

This is it? Really? There's nothing else to do other than keep breathing?



Can you get over the disappointment that all we can do is keep breathing... right now?

The minute it came out of my mouth I could see the disappointment in her face. I told her the truth. I told her….I got a tattoo. Seriously, I saw disappointment. This summer I have seen the look of disappointment in so many people’s eyes. Not about my tattoo, but about life. Disappointment seems to be part of the fabric of our lives. What do we do with it? Where do we store it? Do we need to try and overcome it, get rid of it, live with it, carry it around with us?

What if your entire childhood you thought you were going to be a doctor and then you couldn’t get into medical school? What if you thought you were going to run the marathon and you couldn’t run any longer? What if you get hit by a car and spend the rest of life in a wheelchair? What if after thirty years of marriage you are no longer attracted to your partner, physically or emotionally? What if you thought you were going to travel after you retired only to find out you were terminally ill the week after your retirement party? What if you desperately want to have a baby and can’t get pregnant? What if you put every cent you ever saved into a home on the coast only for it to be wiped away in a hurricane? What if your child is born with a serious illness? What if your partner changes dramatically after the kids are born? What if you realize after the kids leave for college that you no longer like each other? What if the person you married develops a mental illness that changes their entire personality?

How are we going to live? How are we going to move forward? How are we going to live our lives with holes in our hearts? How are we going to live with dashed dreams and disappointments?

Maybe we could use Leonard Cohen’s famous quote as our mantra…“There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.” Will the recognition that we all walk around with this crack help us? Will just knowing we all have this in common keep us putting one foot in front of the other? Can we see life’s disappointments in a bigger context? Can we recognize disappointment as just part of the whole rather than the whole?

Sometimes we may need someone to tell us to get up, get out of bed, get in the shower and move on. Sometimes we may need to stay in bed. Sometimes we may need a few hours, a few days, maybe even years to let allow the patchwork to dry so we can learn to love the life we have been given. Suffering happens when we resist reality, when we resist the life we are leading.

If we try to dive a bit deeper, what is disappointment? Maybe disappointment is simply resisting what is. Can there be disappointment if we don’t have any expectations? If we are living in the moment then there would be no expectation of future events and there would be no need to carry around what happened in the past. Is it possible to feel disappointed if we are accepting everything and everybody just as they are?

If we are accepting everything and everybody, then we would get the letter saying we weren’t accepted into Harvard and we wouldn’t have expected it to be any different that it was. We would we would run to prepare to race in the marathon without expecting to run in the marathon. There would be moments of attraction to your partner of thirty years and moments of not being attracted to your partner of thirty years. There would be life together without the expectation of it being different and there would be opportunity to choose, in the moment, what to do if something needed to be done. You might have purchased the house in Florida, but you wouldn’t expect that you would get to live there. You might plan to travel after retirement, but there would not be the expectation that it would happen. If your partner changes into someone you don’t like after the children are born, you would recognize the change and decide what you needed to do. If you were unable to become pregnant, there would be the understanding there are other options. There would be the understanding that everything is as it should be and that no matter the external circumstances, we can be at peace on the inside.

It seems that it is part of life to walk around with expectations. Sometimes we are aware of them and sometimes we aren’t. Likely, we become more aware of them when extreme suffering happens as a result of them. Maybe our spiritual practice isn’t about aiming for a life without expectations, but rather aiming towards a life of recognizing when we aren’t living in the moment and when we are constructing expectations in our mad monkey minds. Maybe it’s about recognizing that when we are attached to those expectations, we suffer. I believe it is human nature to grieve when we have been attached to some hope or dream that is lost. If there is a grief, there is grief. This isn’t about not grieving or denying our feelings. It’s not about being perfect. This is about doing the best we can and suffering as little as possible. This is about living in freedom.

Sometimes when we are disappointed we may need to take some sort of action. We may need to apply to a different college, we may need to seek marriage counseling, we may need to look at adopting a child. We need to find a way to love what is. Eckhart Tolle has said: ”Wherever you Are, Be There Totally. If you find your here and now is intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. “

We only have now. Are you going to be at peace and free from suffering? We really don’t have to know that much. It’s really not as complicated as I tend to make it in my life. There are moments when I don’t have expectations and there aren’t disappointments. In those moments I am present to whatever is happening and there isn’t suffering. There are moments I am so stuck in my head, thinking about the future and/or the past and I have an expectation, a belief about how things should be. If that belief doesn’t match up with reality, then suffering occurs. Sometimes buckets of it.

Let’s wake up to right now. Let’s wake up and recognize we are breathing and that all there is is right now. As Ingrid Michaelson sings…” All that I know is that I’m breathing. All I can do is keep breathing. All we can do is keep breathing. Now. Now. Now. “