I awoke this morning to heavy grey skies, thunder and rain worthy of a monsoon. After indulging in a reiki self-treatment in bed, then sitting for a while, the rain was still falling unabated. My stomach was calling for action though, so I waded to the café, a hundred metres down the road, through ankle deep water, wearing only bathing shorts. A dry bag allowed me to bring a towel and shirt, for a modicum of decency, and a laptop so that I can write this blog entry!
There is an expression in English, “It never rains but it pours.” So it often feels with our troubles. Everything can be going just nicely, when suddenly a heap of problems burst upon us in quick succession. Why is that? Is it the alignment of the planets? Or perhaps the mind, when under pressure, tends to feel everything as a problem? Or perhaps there is a genuine clustering phenomenon, like the stars forming galaxies? Your guess is as good as mine.
In case you think that enlightenment will make life go the way you want it, I will share with you what happened to me in Hampi one evening, a few days ago. Watching sunset with a lovely companion and enjoying an excellent chai atop a hill, courtesy of an enterprising young chai wallah, aged about 12, everything seemed to be wonderful. We hopped on the rented motorbike and drove to the river crossing downstream, where battered coracles ferry people and bikes to and fro, during daylight hours. In the fading light, we saw the little boat reaching the far shore and then came the call of the ferryman, “Finished for today, come in the morning!”
We sat in the dark for a while, weighing up our options. We were on one side of a river, which was in spate, and our cosy guest house room, together with our toothbrushes, was on the other side. We jumped on the bike and started to head back to Hampi Bazaar. Halfway there though, in the middle of nowhere, the engine began to cut out: we were running out of fuel. I managed to coax the machine to the next village, where the local store had sold out of petrol.
We continued for a few hundred metres more before the engine finally died into an emphatic silence. My companion got off and started to walk whilst I pushed the bike. It was then that my companion was caught out by an unexpected moment of diarrhoea. It never rains but it pours.
If you think that enlightenment will make life go the way you want it to, then think again. That is not my experience, at least. Enlightenment, for me, means that I can accept what is actually happening and not pay much attention to what the mind was expecting or hoping to happen. And that change of attitude means that unexpected things are not felt as problems. Instead, there is a curiosity in the mind at such times.
And now that I have written enough, the pouring has stopped.
