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I wrote this poem on August 30th back in 2000, when I was 17, during a period of fairly intensive meditational practise. In the ten years since then, I’ve found it re-posted in the most unexpected places on the web since then, so apparently it has struck a cord with some:
After the afternoon meditation,
the mind standing still,
yet unfocused,
foggy.
At 8 p.m.,
suddenly wanting to go to bed,
I realise, almost surprisingly,
I’m depressed.
I’m standing on a crossroad,
loosing interest in the sensory world,
TV, books, computer, etc.,
all fail to give me pleasure.
Yet, the mind is not ready,
to harvest the true fruits of practise.
Wishing I could find just a little pleasure somewhere,
yet happy that I’m not.
No self.
How brilliant by Siddharta,
sweeping away all contradictions,
giving an answer not even considered by anybody else.
“The condition conditioning itself,
thus creating the self”, said Kierkegaard;
and I find myself yearning for the un-conditioned.
Wondering how my life could have turned out,
had my mind not been deprived of choice;
seeing clearly how this path was inevitable.
For I stand now at crossroad leading only one way,
with no turning back.
And despite my depression,
smiling.
Ever since I was a kid, I had always found it strange how people were satisfied with just being happy some of the time, or even with being somewhat happy some of the time. I never knew what I wanted to grow up to be, but I knew I wanted to be happy. Not just somewhat happy, but amazingly happy and happy all the time. Why would I let this life go by with less if more happiness was possible?
As I started to enter my teens, I was slowly coming around to what I had been told all my life in response to these impressions: That when I grow up, I will realise the world doesn’t work the way I think it does and that you can’t always get what you want.
One day when I was about 14, I had to do a book report for school and was scanning the shelves of my local library for anything to capture my interest. The book title that did capture my interest that day was named “The Empty Mirror” by Janwillem van de Wetering. The suggestion of paradox in the title tickled my curiosity and I took it home without knowing what it was about. It turned out to be about the author’s journey to Japan back in the 60s, where he spent a year in a Zen Buddhist monastery, trying to find some answers to fill the longing in his heart neither travels, the good life or philosophy could sate.
It struck an immediate cord with my 14-year-old self at the time. Here was a man who not only had the same yearning to be truly happy as I did, but was going through life not able to be satisfied with not satisfying this yearning and was willing to take radical steps to find his answers, even if he did struggle with the process.
I finished the book the next day and immediately went down to the library to borrow all the books I could find about Buddhism. As I was reading about the life of the Buddha, I was surprised to find a sense of kinship with this man who had lived in India 2500 years ago that I couldn’t find from my surroundings in present-day Denmark. The young prince Siddharta had it all. Money, status, career, looks, women, a loving family, intelligence, even morals and a good heart to boot. The full package of everything we are told are ingredients in the formula for happiness in modern society. And yet he still wasn’t happy. Not that he had particular reason to be unhappy. But he was not happy because he had that deep yearning in his heart for a deeper happiness, an unshakeable and profound happiness. And until he found that, there would always be something missing. And he not only found it, he laid out a path for others to follow as well.
The Buddha looked within and found all the happiness in the world inside his own heart and mind.
Reading about his journey towards this unshakeable happiness, a journey that took him through many great kinds of happiness he discarded because they too couldn’t satisfy that yearning in his heart, was a defining moment for me. There were people out there with the same intuitions about happiness as me and people who had pursued that path with great resolve and actually found results with it. I was not only finding re-assurance that my yearning for this kind of happiness was not just a silly kid’s fantasy, but pointers and directions for how to actually go about it from fellow seekers on that path.
What I wanted to grow up to be, careerwise and what not, became secondary from that point on. I was going to be happy, really happy, and I wouldn’t, still won’t, consider this life well lived until that sense of unshakeable and profound happiness is my everyday experience.
To this day, there is an ache and yearning in my heart that won’t let me forget it.
Leaves from the Tree of Life 