DUKKHA, NOT A GOOD FIT
When Joseph Goldstein defined Dukkha, suffering, in his Buddhist podcast whether I mentioned a couple of days ago I had a pretty good idea of what he was talking about. I have a sense of dukkha as physical suffering through sickness and death and I have a sense of dukkha as mental suffering of the loss of friends or people we love and a sense of dukkha as the loss of everything we are attached to because everything is impermanent.
But when he said that one form of Dukkha was not being a good fit I wasn’t sure what he was referring to.
But the more I thought about it the more I began to realize that my whole life has been wrestling with being a good fit, and maybe this is true of most everyone.
I grew up in north India where my father was an agricultural missionary. Because the North Indian plains where my father worked were so hot in the summer, all the children of missionaries went to a boarding school, Woodstock, in the lower Himalayas where it was cool. In the winter months when it cold in the mountains and cool in Allahabad where my father taught in an agricultural college. I was completely comfortable in our large house with 20 foot ceilings and servants all around in Allahabad and I felt completely at home in boarding at Woodstock School. I and my brother saw my father three months of the year and my mother, who came to the mountains in the summer for six months a year from the time I was nine and my brother seven. In Allahabad there were no American children to play with. In the mountains we spoke American English, learned American subjects, played American games. I felt like I belonged in both places and certainly didn’t feel like a misfit.
But I realize that for many people the life I led seems odd and exotic and a little precarious. We were, after all expatriots far from home in a country that would later shrug off missionaries in the way an elephant would shrug off fleas. It seems obvious now that we didn’t really belong.
But I didn’t realize this until I returned to America for college. Suddenly, even though I spoke the same American English as everyone else, had an American high school education like everyone else, went to the same church as everyone else I suddenly felt as if I didn’t belong.
It turns out that I wasn’t as AMerican as I thought I was. At Woodstock we didn’t have dances because some fundamentalist missionaries believed dancing was a sin. I didn’t miss dancing, never having put my arms around someone and danced. We had roller skating parties instead. We played softball and hockey, instead of baseball and football. We had no telephones or anyone to telephone if we did, no radio stations and no American popular music, none of the ordinary American snacks, little sense of American politics. I was in a social sense, out of it, a misfit, even though I appeared to be just like everyone else.
I didn’t fit in then and I don’t fit in now although I feel comfortable in Swannanoa. But I don’t belong here. I married, Kathe, a German woman in Germany where I feel comfortable and can speak German, but don’t feel that I belong. I feel comfortable in Virampur village in Gujurat and at the Sahi River Guest House in Varanasi, but don’t belong there. I am a foreigner in every place including Swannanoa.
And I don’t regret not fitting in. Because the fact is that we are all foreigners in every place except where we grow up and every place on earth is a foreign place.
This seems to me to fit the Buddha’s experience. He was a prince who left the pomp and comfort of the court because he felt like a misfit. Life was not satisfying. He sat under the Bo tree until he realized that it was attachment that was unsatisfying and as soon as he let go he felt fully alive and achieved a blissful state.
We can’t all be Buddha but we can be freed from being caught in complete attachment to our way of living, the culture that we were born into. It is good to escape the constraints of our own culture and realize that there are all sorts of ways of being fully alive and that we can learn from people who do things differently. We can also be freed from the things that our culture does that hurt other people, both here and abroad.
We can also learn from other misfits, who can’t fully belong, because of race, gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation or any number of other reasons. These people are better able to show us how to deal with being a misfit than those who are trying to hang onto their security of being in control with all the anxiety that goes with that. Maybe the best we can do is to admit that we are all misfits and to accept each other as we are. Maybe that is the truth about Dukkha that fits me best. And that will my sermon on Sunday for anyone who wants to listen.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 