I Wanna Be Well by Miguel Chen

Author:Miguel Chen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

tl;dr

Sit on your butt and breathe. Set an intention to give a gift to every person you encounter today. Give a gift to every person you encounter today. Whether it’s an actual gift or simply a kind thought, give. Know you won’t receive anything in return, and give anyway. Reflect on how giving freely changed your day. How do you feel?

13.

Change

WE ALL KNOW THAT THINGS CHANGE. Change, after all, has been happening all our lives. And yet we often find ourselves resisting or fearing it. But if we know that everything really is always changing, why not embrace that as a source of connection, opening our hearts to life instead of hiding in fear and denial?

One way leads us toward our perfect day. The other keeps us a prisoner. What’ll it be?

The truth of impermanence, as Buddhism puts it, is that all things are always changing, and our suffering comes not from the changes themselves but from our resistance to them, in the form of clinging and aversion. Clinging just means that we want to hold on to certain things. Aversion is just wanting to push other things away. With either one, we’re trying to control the uncontrollable, and that shit never works — at least, not for long. Only by making peace with the reality of impermanence can we begin to find peace within ourselves.

Changes, of course, run the gamut. Sometimes they can be welcome, even exciting: a raise at work, a better place to live, an opportunity to do something you’ve always wanted to do. If you’ve been shoveling dog shit for a living and then suddenly someone offers you a job playing guitar, change may even seem like a miracle.

On the other hand, if you’ve been with your partner for a decade and they suddenly run off with someone else, that’s the kind of change that can be really fucking unwelcome, even terrifying.

Most change falls somewhere in the middle. When my band does a new record, for example, some fans might complain that it’s too much like our other records; other fans might complain that we took a risk and did a slow song with strings for a change of pace. Whatever some might want and some might not, change (or lack of it) is going to bum people out.

Change is relentless: it comes in an infinite number of forms, and it happens every second of every day. Some changes are subtle: a new pair of shoes, a shift in the direction of the wind, the turning of food into farts. Other changes are less subtle: a new job, a new family member, residence in a new country, divorce, death. No matter how subtle or direct change is, it’s all around us, all the time. Right here, right now? Change. And once this moment is over, things will be different forever.

So if all things, even this moment, are impermanent, how do we deal with it? Well, as my old friend Tony Sly (the late, great singer of No Use for a Name) used to say: we’ve got options.

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