I Can't Get No Satisfaction

If I made a list for you of all the things I have ever loved to do, or felt passionate about, they would all have one thing in common. After a while, they have all become a fucking chore.

From every new instrument I've set out to learn, to every new person I've vowed to love, without fail.
Why is that? That verve, that drive, that I always feel in the beginning is never really sustainable. Is it that I just haven't found the right thing? Do I have commitment issues? Is it that all-too cliched fear of success?
The closest thing I can come up with for an explanation is that I love the possibilities, but dread any and all responsibility that may come with it. If I'm doing something because I want to then it's fun, but the second I put that pressure on myself that I have to do something, well, all bets are off.

Where all this has gotten me is the feeling that I've just been wasting my time. That I've been doing all these things, but have nothing to show for them. This gets depressing as shit.

Lucky for me, there are these four noble truths laying around to remind me that I am not special and unique like a snowflake, and that there is something I can do about it.

The four noble truths, expressed as song titles (by me):

1. Everybody Hurts (REM)
The first noble truth is all about the fact that, well, everyone hurts. From the CEO of a fortune 500 to the homeless guy you blew off when he asked you for change last weekend. No one gets off easy. We seem to have this tendency to think that people in the right circumstances are exempt from pain, but that's a load of crap. The next time your Aunt Dottie starts going on about how her life would be perfect if she just could win the lottery, feel free to slap her and tell her so. There's just no way around it. The bottom line of the human condition is this: Life is pain, anyone telling you different is selling something (credit to The Princess Bride for that one).

2.  I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (U2)
The second one gets a little more into the why of it all. It all comes down to the discrepancy between the way we think our lives should be, and the way they really are. If I think the person in front of me on my commute to work should be driving a reasonable speed, yet they insist on going ten below the speed limit, it upsets me. On a much grander scale, if I'm caught up in comparing my life as it is to the way I thought it would be by this point, I am always going to walk away from that depressed. This gets referred to a lot as attachment. As in, I cannot be fulfilled and happy with my life because I am unwilling or unable to let go of my attachment to my ideals of where/who I should be.

3. Surrender (Cheap Trick)
The third truth is the most purely logical of the bunch. This one more or less says, if your attachments are causing you pain, letting go of those attachments will make your pain stop. This is the acceptance truth. There is a line in the Serenity Prayer (yeah, the one from those 12-step meetings) that is incredibly applicable here. Everyone knows the short version, but it continues, and in one place says something to the effect of taking the world, "as it is, not as I would have it." That's the whole idea. Girls with straight hair always wish it were curly, and the curly-haired girls always want it straight. But if you can learn to accept your imperfect life as it is, and learn to love it as your own, a great deal of your feelings of inadequacy and dissatisfaction will go away.

4. The Way (Fastball)
Oh, you mean all I have to do is break free from the years of conditioning and programming that have completely shaped the way I think of myself, my life, and the world around me? Why didn't you say so?? There is a major "easier said than done" factor here. Obviously, if it were that easy everyone would do it. The fourth noble truth offers the blueprint of exactly how to go about doing it: the noble eightfold path. The eightfold path consists of: Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. And before you ask, yes, I had to look them up because I can never remember them all. Each one of them is worth its own blog entry alone. The most condensed version I can give of this is that if you stay mindful of what you are doing, and act with pure motivation, you're on the right track.

Oh, and sit. Sit a whole lot. They love their sitting.

So there you have it folks. The bad news is that life sucks and there's no way around it; the good news is that it sucks for everyone else to, and whenever you get tired of feeling bad there's something you can do about it.