Waiting for Wisdom

Today, I feel uneasy.  I am frustrated, and feeling that things aren’t going well.  I could delve deeply into the nature of the frustration I feel, but in reality it doesn’t matter.

Frustration, anger, fear, anxiety, they are all the same.

They don’t exist.

I went on my walk, like usual.  Same time of day, same path.  I let myself ruminate on these frustrated feelings.  They churn inside my head, creating a frothy stew of angst.  Over and over, I turn these frustrations around, looking at them, from different angles.  Inspecting them, checking to see that yes indeed, this feeling sucks.

I continue walking.  It’s a beautiful day out, not that I noticed.  I was wading deep into feeling.  Captured completely.  I could see it from above.  That part of me that didn’t have any of those feelings.  The part that simply sees it all going on.  I could see frustration, and the man feeling it.

“This too shall pass.” I reminded myself.  Wise words, but since I am not wise, they fell on my own deaf ears. 

My path took me by the same creek I always pass.  Today, I deviated.  I walked down to the stream, passing by the benches.  I consider slumping in one to further explore today’s unique despair. 

Looking down by the water I see a stump, cut flat about 18 inches off the ground and right next to the water.  A better seat by far, I decide.  And it was.

Sitting there quietly, I wait in a clear day’s sun for the storm to pass me by.  I close my eyes, and feel the sunlight on my face.  Warm and pleasant, I begin to notice the sounds of the stream.  I listen to the little trickles, and splashes against the rocks and roots that make up the boundaries of the waterway.  Opening my eyes again, I catch sight of a small twig carried by the water until it is out of view.

As I watched and listened it occurred to me: this river does not exist.  There is something here, that behaves in a river-like way, yet when I thought deeply about it, I could not find it.

I asked myself: If I take a cup and scoop water out of this river, is it still a river?

Of course it is.  It is not a river minus one cup of river.  There is no single unit of river I could Identify that would, if added up, create more ‘river.’

I continued to ponder this oddity.  The riverless river.  The creekless creek.  The streamless stream.

I could add a cup of water, and I would not make a bigger river.  I could add rocks, more and more, and the river would not become just rocks.  What would it do?  It would still ‘river’ itself around those obstructions, moving them around again until it had no more energy to move the rocks.

I started to get clever.  I realized that this water is flowing from somewhere.  I could go upstream and put in a dam.  As an engineer I knew this was the correct solution, surely. 

But I would fail, because it would become a lake.  And a lake is just an overweight river.  If the water stopped flowing, it would simply turn an active river into a potential river.  If the dam burst, there would be a surge of water.  That surge wouldn’t be called a ‘river,’ it would become a new kind of nothing called a ‘flood.’  That would slowly subside, and I’d have this damn river again.

I was perplexed.  I could not, for the life of me, find something that was right in front of my face.  I am looking at something called a river, and realizing that while I can see it, it is not really there.  It isn’t really a thing.  It was a verb, not a noun.  It was a happening, not a thing that does something.  It is a set of conditions.

My problem then grew.  Because I could see that if a river was not really a thing, then neither was anything else.  I wasn’t there, in the same way as the river.  I am a verb, not a noun.  The human body is just a slow-moving river.  Cells come in and go out.  I am more like a container of cells, but that even isn’t right.  I am a container of containers.  Each replacing itself at different rates.  If I wait long enough, almost every single cell of my body will disappear, to be replaced by other cells.  Just like the water flowing by me is molecules of water that are constantly being replaced. 

Like the river, I could reduce my body down until I isolate the ‘real’ me, only to find that no single piece would satisfy the definition.  That would be the same mistake one would make if they cut into onion skins looking for the onion.  They would find that it was onion skins all the way down.

Nothing has object permanence.  Every thing we call a thing, will eventually not be.  It’s a matter of time only.  Everything in the universe is a flowing happening, like this river in front of me.  Different flowrates make it seem like some things are solid, others liquid, others gases, and all the rest we simply call “energy.”

And would you look at that.  After this realization, I can no longer find all that frustration that brought me here.  Where did it go?  Well, it was just another moving thing, making me believe that something was really real there, when really nothing was at all.  Frustrationless frustration. 

And it is nowhere to be found.