A few months ago I had a cool experience, what the Buddhists might call a moment of insight.
My therapist had just reflected to me "it's okay to feel good", something we'd been talking about earlier. And I was about to say, "but I haven't been feeling good!" This seemed obviously true. I'd been experiencing back pain, anxiety, all kinds of less-than-good feelings.
But before the words came out of my mouth, before the concept even entirely took shape in my head, I stopped.
Life is made up of gazillions of moments. Some of those moments feel good. Some of them don't. (If you look closely enough, that's true even in the span of a few seconds. I can sit and meditate on my back pain and there are still pleasant sensations mixed in with the unpleasant ones, on a moment-to-moment basis.) Why was I focusing on the experience of feeling bad?
Something happened then, when I refrained from thinking the thought that "I haven't been feeling good". My perception of the world changed. My perception of myself changed. It wasn't that my back pain went away, or my anxiety. But I felt like I'd been let out of a box — a box made out of my own belief in (or tendency to focus on) "not feeling good".
The sound of the birds. The shape of the clouds. The exact shade of the skin of the person sitting across from me on the train. The feeling of vitality in my own body. There's joy in all of these things (and thousands of others). But I often don't notice it, or don't let it in, because I'm too busy paying attention to whatever it is that I don't like, or whatever I'm worrying about.
Rob Burbea calls insight "seeing that frees", and this was one of those moments. For some minutes after seeing through my story about not feeling good, I felt probably the free-est I've ever felt in my entire life. I felt joy, energy, connection, ease. Of course, this feeling didn't last. But I still have the memory of it, as a reminder that "I don't feel good" is a concretization of a gestalt, a script that I don't have to live by.
*
Shortly after I had this experience, my therapist told me this Zen story:
Once upon a time, as a man was walking through a forest, he saw a tiger peering out at him from the underbrush. As the man turned to run, he heard the tiger spring after him to give chase.
Barely ahead of the tiger, running for his life, our hero came to the edge of a steep cliff. Clinging onto a strong vine, the man climbed over the cliff edge just as the tiger was about to pounce.
Hanging over the side of the cliff, with the hungry tiger pacing above him, the man looked down and was dismayed to see another tiger, stalking the ravine far below. Just then, a tiny mouse darted out from a crack in the cliff face above him and began to gnaw at the vine.
At that precise moment, the man noticed a patch of wild strawberries growing from a clump of earth near where he dangled. Reaching out, he plucked one. It was plump, and perfectly ripe; warmed by the sunshine.
He popped the strawberry into his mouth. It was perfectly delicious.
The End.
[Source: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-tiger-and-the-strawberry-b73de1dccf19]
So, this is a perfect story for my insight experience, right? I might be surrounded by tigers — or just by anxiety and back pain! — but there is still sweetness in life, and it's right here, right now, ready to be enjoyed. Can I find the "strawberry" that's in front of me right now?
*
Some time later, I came across an article claiming that this story has been widely misinterpreted. It's not about living in the moment, the author claims. It's about the foolishness of reaching for pleasure. In this interpretation, the man in the parable is sealing his fate by pursuing the sweetness of the strawberry. Perhaps if he had not been so distracted, he could have escaped his predicament!
This sounds reasonable as a Buddhist lesson: Instead of grasping after sensory pleasures, we must stay focused on the real task at hand: to free ourselves from the craving, aversion, and ignorance which cause our suffering.
To be honest, I don't love this interpretation. It's less beautiful to me, and there's less joy in it. It feels like weight. And anyway, it seems a bit far-fetched to say that if only he hadn't reached for that strawberry he would somehow survive.
But also. I'm basically a Buddhist, and I think it's true that grasping after pleasure (or after anything, really) leads to suffering. Indeed, I've seen this myself after the experience I described at the top of this post.
Because it turns out that paying attention to the moments of joy is easier said than done, especially when you've been doing something different for the past forty-something years (and also, negativity bias is a thing). And it turns out that trying to get back to that state of joy and freedom is a great way to suffer. Believing that I "should" be tuning into joy more is a great way to suffer. Wondering why I can't seem to drop my old story about not feeling good, is a really great way to suffer. Telling myself that I'm "not really feeling bad" is a great way to gaslight myself, and suffer.
*
So, okay, this is a case of "both and".
There is joy available all the time, and if we are grasping after that joy we will be devoured by the twin tigers of craving and aversion. This is kind of Buddhism 101.
But if it's hard to retrain myself to pay more attention to joy, it's ten times harder to do so without grasping.
And I think this is why I like this parable so much. It doesn't read to me like the man is chasing strawberries. He's not "trying to enjoy the moment". Dangling from the vine, he finds the wisdom of no escape. There is no try.
Chased by a tiger is how things are;
hanging from a vine is how things are;
mouse chewing is how things are;
delicious strawberry is how things are.
The end.