Ride the wave – what has Hamlet got to do with it?

Life is a feast of many flavours. Equanimity, stability, consistency are not going to be delivered by life. Shakespeare had it in a nutshell in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: we ‘suffer slings and arrows’, as humans we are heir to heartache and a ‘thousand natural shocks’.

To be or not to be– that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep
No more – and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to …

Life will offer up joy and sorrow, sweet and sour, pleasure and pain. How can we maintain our centre and groundedness while being tossed and tumbled by life in human form?

We are often poorly schooled both in managing the joy, the sweet and the pleasure, and in managing the sorrow, the sour and the pain. In the main, our culture tells us to grip tightly to the joy, the sweet and the pleasure, pursue it, at all costs, and attach to it fast, like a barnacle, if we find it. Sadly those messages often advise that we look in all the wrong places: external places like money, position, power, sex, acquisitions. Our culture exhorts also that we avoid sorrow, sour and pain. And if sorrow, sour and pain befall us, as it will, we must strive to get over it, heal and move on, learn the lesson and put very great effort into to not having that experience again. Sometimes we even perceive it as a shameful thing, a failure in ourselves if we experience sorrow, sour and pain or don’t heal quickly and efficiently.

Consider Hamlet again –

‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.

It is our naming of the experience of pain and sorrow as negative, wrong, to be avoided, and our attachment, sometimes desperate attachment, to joy, sweet and pleasure that creates a problem out of life’s journey for us.

Consider the surfer, riding the wave.

Does she fight against the movement of the wave, does she argue with the form, does she label it?

Does she rant against the power of the sea?

Does she try to own the wave, keep it, hold on to it forever?

No.

She rides it.

She learns to move with the flow of the wave, she learns to understand its form and grace, she learns to appreciate its beauty and understand its power, she balances on the force of that power as she rides it into shore.

She knows the wave is a passing thing.

She knows that her experience of the wave is fleeting, whether it is an exhalant joyful experience or a turbulent, tumbled experience.

And when she washes up on shore, what does she do?

She turns around and paddles back out to the next wave, taking the experience of the last wave with her, she bundles her energy and enthusiasm and greets the next wave head on.

Sometimes she sits beyond the breaking of the waves, and watches.

Sometimes she chooses not to take a particular wave.

Sometimes she learns from other surfers.

Sometimes she rests on the shore.

Sometimes, when she has caught a wave that turns out to be bigger or more turbulent than she thinks she can manage, she just holds on tight, looks after herself as best she can and waits to be washed up on the shore.

 And that is what we learn from her: watch, choose, listen, learn, ride, rest, accept the fleeting impermanence, re-enter with enthusiasm, and sometimes just hold on tight, look after yourself as best you can, and wait – it will pass.

ACTION

Life is a feast of many flavours.  What joys and sorrows have you experienced? Did they pass? Did they lose some of their intensity?

 Consider Hamlet ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’

 How might you have experienced these joys and sorrows differently if you had not named them so?

Journal your thoughts and over the next three days notice when you label something ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and experiment with not naming it so, just experiencing it. Does this change the experience?

BIG light

elke