Any one who regularly reads my blog will have noticed that I can be very moody. That is partly because a lot of things in life suck, and partly because I am just like that, but it is also because, when I am down, I work very hard to get back up. Otherwise I would just be miserable (which is not the same as being moody). It is not easy getting back up because I suffer from pain and fatigue a lot of the time. For a few days, or even weeks I might start to feel better, but then I wake up and I am wright at the bottom again.
I have been thinking a lot about mood recently. Yesterday my (Buddhist) meditation teacher played a recording of a talk on suffering. A bit simplified, the Buddhist position on suffering is that we have a choice: If I stump my toe, or my girl friend leaves, or I am severely injured in a car accident. Then I have no choice about the thing that has happened, but, with practice, I can learn to control my response to whatever happened. It can be a moment of pain and irritation, or it can become an endless spiral of anger and misery. It might not often seem like it, but it is up to me.
Then, this morning, I read a blog (on here) also about mood, and I started to think there are all ways the good things in life: trees, flowers, pornography, food, and so on. I am probably not explaining my self very well, so this is a Zen parable that I came across somewhere:
A monk was traveling across a field and he encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed and snarled at him from above. Trembling and hanging there, the monk looked down to where, far below, a second tiger was waiting for him to fall, to eat him.
Then out of a crevice in the cliff two mice, one white and one black, appeared and little by little they started to gnaw away at the vine. The monk noticed a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. Delicious! How sweet it tasted!
The version of the parable that I originally herd ended like this: The strawberries and the tiger are all ways there. It is just a matter of which we give are attention to.
