Stop Chasing, Start Listening

Checking email and ‘socializing’ online have taught me how I am a slave to the Eight Worldly Concerns. A super enlightened guy (our buddy Buddha) said that humans are preoccupied with four buckets of mud – pleasure/pain, gain/loss, fame/disgrace, praise/blame. We ping pong all over the place: We hope for – we chase – pleasure, gain, fame and praise. We fear – we hide from – pain, loss, disgrace and blame.

A walk through my inbox, or Facebook and Instagram feeds makes Buddha’s clarity very clear to me. It’s obvious that clicking, replying, commenting, skimming make me more and more “wanty” and fearful. I lose my awareness, and get lost in a dizzying maze of keeping up, doing, doing, doing.

I want this and that, repeatedly. A never-ending cycle. Every mouth-watering chocolaty recipe makes me crave the pleasure of tasting something sweet. And then immediately, the disgrace of becoming overweight chimes in. I want to travel to those white sandy beaches, and look Photoshopped in real life. But then, being blamed for “not working hard enough” rears its colossal head. I want more followers, more great outfits, more money, more accomplishments, and more acknowledgments. I want a big fat thumbs up, not a thumbs-down life! I don’t want fame, per se, but I want to be appreciated and lauded for my work by a circle of admirers (first and foremost my own kids!). Be critically acclaimed and awarded by those who have “good taste”. But at the same time, I can’t bear being criticized, fried by one-star reviews or ordinaryness. Eek. I really am a ping pong ball.

There’s this pit-of-my-stomach churning too, a general “I need to do more, I need to do better” feeling. It comes from fear. I run away from pain. The idea of sickness, or rejection, or feeling like I’m at bottom of any barrel, is unpleasant. Anything unpleasant is unwanted – run the other way! The idea of falling flat or failing is unacceptable so I book more meetings, read more books and keep chasing success by all means necessary. Success stories really shine on Facebook and Instagram, don’t they? Some photos, even unfiltered ones, ooze a feeling of “I’ve made it.” Those are the ones that get me. It’s the “she’s made it, I haven’t” game. The “he knows what he’s doing, I’m not so sure” conundrum. I’m constantly falling for other people’s success stories and it hurts. Then I do something to compensate – start building my own success story, running wildly in the general direction of success. Plan, plan, plan. I really am a ping pong ball. This is no way to live. Where is my center? Being a ping pong ball sucks.

In ‘Living Beautifully’ American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron writes, “The eight worldly concerns are, at bottom, just an outdated mechanism for survival. In that sense, we’re still functioning at a very primitive level, completely at the mercy of hope and fear. The mechanism of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure kept us from being eaten, kept us from freezing to death in winter, kept us figuring out how to get food and how to clothe ourselves. This worked well for our ancestors, but it isn’t working very well for us now… We’re like ping pong balls being bounced back and forth by our aversions and desires, and we’re way overdue for trying a fresh alternative.”

So then, what to do? Ping-ponging seems to be in our nature. How can I evolve? I think the first step is always just seeing things the way they are. The acknowledging. I stop running, stop hiding. First, I stop to see that I am just a ping pong ball pinging from here to there. Like a scientist, or medical practitioner, I use tools to diagnose the problem: the problem is ping-ponging endlessly, without awareness.

What would happen if I stopped acting on my cravings for pleasure and my fear of pain? What if I stopped playing ping pong and became a spectator? I made this my practice. I feel left, dropped, on the court, in a wide-open space. Vulnerable. Defenseless. A new way of being.

As a spectator, there is a place in between, a resting place. Like that spot in between inhalation and exhalation. In this in-between, middle space, there is no destination. There is no arrival. There is no top of Everest. There is only watching that ping pong ball, the habitual swinging from “I want” to “I don’t want.”

Awareness brings lightness. “Just be,” for your own sake, I’ve realized. Just come back to this moment and see that everyone is walking the same path, everyone is ping-ponging. Nothing is permanent. There are no success stories, only stories. Being human is living on a path, never arriving. Just walking on. The break from playing ping pong is the closest thing I have ever felt to freedom.