My Got-It-Togetherness Graph

The other day, my wife was telling me a story of a friend’s mother who recently had some perspective delivered in the form of a stroke. The friend apparently mentioned that maybe she should spend more time hanging out with me, I was a little puzzled. I asked “What would I have to offer?” She smiled, and in that way only a wife can, reminded me that — being a “Buddhist guy” — many people think that I must have it all together.

Ha! My thoughts on this can be summed up nicely in the following graph.

I’d only add that so much of what the Buddha teaches tells us that having it together is not what its all about. So many of the teachings — impermanence, thusness, Metta, suffering, and so on — start from where we are the most imperfect and don’t move very far from there. Not only that, the Buddha doesn’t teach us about ending up on top of the world, but being right where we are in the world, right now. Striving for and arriving at some future perfect state is just another recipe for suffering.

So, for those of you with the belief that we Buddhists somehow have a special stash of “Got-It-Togetherness”, you can let go of that idea right now.

If you liked this piece, please take a moment to recommend it!

Originally published at www.andrewfurst.net on May 9, 2016.