10,000 Joys; 10,000 Sorrows. January 19, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Life & Living, Positive Thinking.Tags: acceptance, happiness, joy, sorrow, Zen Buddhism
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Sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug. Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. You can’t win ‘em all. You can’t always get what you want. There are lots of variations of this idea, but my personal favorite is from the Zen Buddhists: 10,000 joys; 10,000 sorrows.
It can seem sometimes like our lives are lived from one disappointment to another — the check didn’t come today, the car needs a new water pump, Frank at work is being a jerk, we wish we had a better job — on and on. To make matters worse, we often allow the residue of our last emotion to stain the current one so that it becomes tainted, or even invisible. We blow some out of proportion, highlight them. For example, Travis made a snide comment during class, and so now you’re hardly listening to your girlfriend sitting across from you and miss altogether that pleasant experience with her.
Oddly enough, our focus on the negative comes out of a desire to have exactly the opposite. In our desire for a happiness is the naive belief that someday we will have all our ducks in a row, and our expectation that we could have a life free of hassles and disappointments causes us to see each problem as a sort of failure when measured against our standard of a great life. But life doesn’t work this way. There is no Happily Ever After when all our problems cease. The future is this: some good stuff will happen, and some bad stuff will happen. Period.
“10,000 joys; 10,000 sorrows” reminds me that this tough time will pass and that there will be more tough times, but that there will be good times as well. It also reminds me during the good times that there will be some bad times ahead. And that’s okay. I’ve come to see my life as a rich and complex tapestry. Each experience weaves in new colors and textures — some coarse, dark and brooding, and some bright and silky. It takes both kinds to create a tapestry with the richness of art, and that’s what we want our lives to be — art, right?
I needed to read this tonight. My world was shrinking into a bitter spiral….I wrote a song a few years back called ten thousand Joys, ten thousand sorrows and tonight a song on the radio called ’10,000 years’ made me think of it. Put it in the ‘puter and came up with your words. It brought me back down to some kind of peace. I’ve lost a bit of perspective lately and my thinking’s been somewhat shrivelled up.
Thanks for the little helping hand!! xxx
Brian,
I can understand where you are right now. Unfortunately, I’ve had the experience of having my world shrink “into a bitter spiral.” It’s a terrible place to be.
May I suggest something? Throughout this blog is expressed my belief in the power of the gratitude journal. Give it a try. You might try to do it the way I did: write two pages, morning and night, of things you are grateful for both today and in your entire life. Do it for about a month.
What happens is that you’ll find it hard to come up with things you were grateful for today, and you’ll start paying attention during the day to all the little good things that happen to you — just so you can have something to write about at the end of the day! At that point, you’ll start to sense some positive changes in the way you see the world.
Try it for a while. Maybe you can get the spiral going the other way. Stay strong.
Thanks for your comment.