Striving to Be Still

Striving to Be Still

                We humans are, so far as I can tell, the only creatures that strive—that strive to be better, to be more, to be different from how we were created.  We have a sense of time, only to understand that we are wasting it.  We have a sense of relationships, only to be lonely or dissatisfied.  True, higher animals can be lonely.  Pets, for example, can feel distress when left alone during the day.  But they don’t, so far as I know, anticipate loneliness.  They live in the moment.  Certainly they don’t blame themselves when they are lonely.

                Often, people work to make themselves more desirable in order to attract a friend or a mate.  It would be interesting to know what percentage of people in a gym are working out just to be more healthy, and how many are striving to be more attractive to potential mates.  And there are lots of people who hold gym memberships but who rarely or never go to the gym.  For them, the struggle was soon over. 

                1 Peter 1:24-25, quoting Isaiah 40:6-8, says:

²⁴Thus, all human life on the earth is like a flower in a field.
The grass dries up and its flower falls off,
²⁵but the Lord’s word endures forever.
This is the word that was proclaimed to you as good news. (Common English Bible)

                Striving is both one of the best human qualities and one of our chief sources of pain.  When I watch an international-level figure skater nail a quadruple jump, my heart pounds and I cheer for the audacious beauty of their achievement.  When I listen to a magnificent symphony, my mind and soul soars with the composer and the musicians.  While I will never perform a skating jump or write a symphony, I rejoice that others have striven to pinnacles of excellence and that I can share the wonder. 

                Likewise, I know the pain of striving and failing.  But in my case, the great failure was always that I didn’t want something strongly enough to strive one hundred percent to achieve it.  That is its own kind of disappointment.  As bad as it may be to “leave it all on the field” and still lose the game, it is also bad never to have known the exhilaration of leaving it all on the field.  Striving, by its very nature, involves pain of one kind or another.  At its best, the reward for striving outweighs the pain of the exertion.

                My understanding of Buddhism is limited, but I believe that one of its chief tenets is that humans should cease from striving because it is a great source of pain.*  This doesn’t mean that Buddhists just sit down and wait to die.  Rather, they learn to base their experience of life on something more changeless and eternal.

                Christians likewise “seek first the kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33), that inner and outer reality based not on striving but upon “being.”  Since God’s love for us is not based on anything we can do to make God love us, we can relax into that love, become as quiet as a weaned child sitting on its mother’s lap (Psalm 131:2).

                But even so, we are very far from the quiet life of fungi, who spend their lives doing only what they were designed to do:  sending out threads to collect nutrients and water, and sending up fruiting bodies when it’s time to procreate.  Though these actions come totally naturally and without striving, fungi rule the world.

                So, I’m wondering whether it’s possible to learn from fungi how to live our purpose, even as we also live as the only of God’s creatures who strive?  David?

______________

*On Tricycle.org’s “Buddhism for Beginners” page, we find: “It’s not easy to answer the question ‘What do Buddhists believe?’ because Buddhism is actually a family of religions that have developed and evolved in different parts of the world, over different historical periods. It’s like asking ‘What do monotheists believe?’ The answer is going to be very different depending on whether we’re talking about Jews or Christians or Muslims, not to mention all the different schools and denominations within each of those groups.”

                And, “The Buddha taught, and Buddhists to the present day believe, that dissatisfaction and suffering, illness, aging, and death are integral parts of life for any sentient being, but the suffering is created by our own attachment and clinging. We want things to be a certain way (and to remain that way), and when they don’t fall into place we continue to cling to our expectations and cause ourselves pain. Every one of our thoughts and actions has a consequence: it either creates further suffering for ourselves or alleviates it. This chain of cause and effect is known as karma.”