Welcoming the Unwelcome by Pema Chodron

Author:Pema Chodron [Chodron, Pema]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2019-10-07T22:00:00+00:00

12

Life Changes in an Instant

When our bubble bursts, we can recognize that we are walking through a very important doorway. Then we can experiment with hanging out on the other side of that doorway. We can learn to relax there.

JOAN DIDION WROTE A BOOK SOME YEARS AGO CALLED The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s about the year following an abrupt change in her life, which was her husband’s unexpected death. In addition to this book’s poignancy and clarity, it also provides an accessible way of going deeper into what it means to go beyond labeling and connect to the mind of open awareness.

She and her husband had come back from the hospital, where their thirty-nine-year-old daughter and only child was in a coma and in very serious condition. They had just sat down for a late dinner. She was focused on mixing the salad and he was enjoying a Scotch. They were talking to each other—and all of a sudden, he wasn’t talking. He had died, just like that.

Soon after he died, she wrote something on her computer. The next time she opened her computer, which was months later, she read what she had written: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

When I read these words, they resonated deeply with me. They brought to mind experiences where a sudden shock completely altered my usual, conventional, held-together view of reality. And it occurred to me that millions of people have had this kind of experience, this out-of-the-blue moment where your world completely falls apart. You don’t have to be a Buddhist practitioner—I don’t believe Joan Didion is one—to go through such abrupt and drastic changes to your concepts of how things are.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche talks about how all of us, whether we want to or not, live in a bubble. This is our own version of reality, created by our ego, which is always turning away from the open-ended nature of how things are and trying to maintain the familiar. Most of the time, we are able to keep this sense of familiarity intact. Everything in our bubble is fairly predictable and seems to make sense. Even if we’re going through a hard time, at some level we’re able to hold it all together. We get up in the morning, we enter a familiar world, we go through our day with many familiar routines. How we prepare our food, how we have our coffee, how we relate to particular people in particular ways—it’s all pretty unsurprising. This isn’t something we consciously choose to do. Whatever kind of life we have, we have our own version of a bubble. It’s our default way of being, and most of the time, we don’t even know we’re doing it.

Even Joan Didion, a sophisticated woman with a rich and varied life, was living in a bubble. She knew her husband had a heart condition that might one day prove fatal. But when

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