There is a quote by John Greenleaf Whittier, the American Quaker poet, which goes:
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.”
I’m sure we’ve all thought it at one time or another. “If only I hadn’t done this,” or “If only I had done that, or done it differently”. That poem was written in 1856 and is a nineteenth century version of the twenty-first century truism, “Live every day as if it were your last.”
Which is, of course, a nonsense. If you lived as if you were going to die tomorrow, you could rob a bank, kill your worst enemy or run off with your neighbour’s husband or wife. It’s usually attached to those inspirational posters you see hanging on the walls of offices, featuring someone scaling a sheer cliff, surfing or base-jumping. It seems to be used as a call to live a life fuelled by, and filled with, adrenaline.
Now there is another, more Buddhist way of looking at it. Indeed, there is a whole fable attached to it with which you are probably familiar:
A man is being chased by a tiger. He runs until he reaches the edge of a cliff. The tiger is still behind him, so he climbs down a vine. The tiger reaches the top of the cliff and paces back and forth, snarling with hunger. Halfway down the cliff, hanging onto the vine, he sees another tiger below him, also pacing back and forth, licking its chops. As he’s hanging there, two mice come out and start gnawing on the vine. He tries to shoo them away, but they won’t go.
If he climbs back up, the tiger will surely devour him, but if he stays where he is then if the fall doesn’t kill him the other tiger certainly will! The slender vine begins to give way, and death is imminent. Just then he notices, growing out of the face of the cliff in front of her, a wild strawberry. He picks it and pops it into his mouth. How sweet it tastes.
I think this is a better way to live every day as if it were your last – indeed every moment as if it were your last. By paying attention. And we spend an awful lot of time paying attention, not to the present, but to the past and the future.
Again, this is reflected in another Buddhist teaching – in fact, the first of the four fundamental Buddhist teachings, the Life is Suffering. Many people interpret this as a bad thing, but the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron reframes it in a more positive way, and poetic way, in her book “The Wisdom of No Escape”:
The first noble truth recognises that we (also) change like the weather, we ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. We [her emphasis] do that, and there’s no reason to resist it. If we resist it, the reality and vitality of life becomes misery, a hell.
So what’s the point of regretting what we haven’t done or things we did in the past. We can’t change them, and to continue to reflect on them, to obsess about them, will only make us sad.
Why am I writing this? Because last time I was in Santa Cruz I was talking to Linda Holiday, 6th dan Chief Instructor of Aikido of Santa Cruz, and a student of Motomichi Anno sensei. I was looking a younger people practising … all right, now I’m sixty-one most of the people I see practising are younger, but these were people I guess were in their early twenties. And I said I felt I’d come to aikido comparatively late in life, at the age of about twenty-eight, and I wished I’d started much earlier; I felt like I’d lost at least ten years.
Linda pointed to an older man, clearly a beginner, who was practising and said “He’s sixty and he’s only just started. You should be grateful for all the time you’ve had studying aikido that he hasn’t.”
This re-framing is very important. It is inevitable that things are going to go wrong in our lives, no matter how careful we are, no matter how decent, kind and honest we feel we are, life is going to treat us unfairly. In that respect, Life is Suffering and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it, unless we stop wishing for “what might have been”.
Everything that has happened in our lives has brought us to the place we are now, and if it’s a place where we can feel content, then we should be grateful for all the things we didn’t do, or got wrong, in our life.
And if we’re not happy with where we are, again there is some very good Buddhist advice, this time from the Dalai Lama. He says:
“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.”
Obviously, although the principle is a very good, but it’s very hard to put into practice. One way to do it, is to do what the man being chased by a tiger did, which is to pay attention. In my aikido practice, I shouldn’t be planning how the technique will end; I shouldn’t be complaining because I can’t pick up a technique as fast as the eighteen-year old next to me, or regretting that I can’t go to a seminar in Belgium because I have to do something with my family.
I should be grateful for thirty-odd years of aikido, I should be grateful that my bad knees make me think around how to do a technique more efficiently, and more than anything, I should be grateful I have a loving family that have supported over those thirty-odd years in my practice of aikido.