(happy) birthday!

tonight my yin and i are playing hooky from our weekly meditation group to attend a friend's birthday party at some Cuban bar two towns north. aside from the obvious dilemma of finding a pork-free dish (the pineapple tamale looks promising), there is the more pressing concern of what to get a woman whose hobby is collecting art from Thailand. i suppose this, like all things, will resolve itself and so i've decided just to trust that the perfect gesture will reveal itself in its own time.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that my friend and i met in a graduate seminar entitled "Sex, Violence and Hollywood" a little less than a year ago, and within weeks were debating one another over the potential feminist message (or lack thereof) contained in Whip It. eventually i adopted her point of view, and in this way my friend reminds me of a woman i knew my first year of college, whose intelligence, wisdom, and life experience seemed to surpass mine by decades.

thankfully my life has been full of such teachers, the people who teach without trying, the individuals who change our lives without effort, the friends whose presence (and passing) comes to shape the people we become.

this, too, is beside the point albeit less so.

the point is that when i was kid, my dad would ask me every time i had a new birthday, "do you feel any older?" i would invariably laugh and tell him no, but over the years i've come to realize that my father was teaching me a profound metaphysical lesson:

each day we live is the only one we have, and the notion that one is more important than the other is both inaccurate and hateful.

needless to say, i did not possess this sort of awareness at 6 or 7, or even 26 or 27 for that matter, but over the years of repetition it eventually sunk in, bypassing my head, seeping into my heart, and then finally making the return trip up the spinal column to my brain, which controls the fingers i use to write this.

as far as i can see, most changes result from experience and practice, and we take on the characteristics of the little things we do with consistency each day. the smiles and prayers and condemnations and judgments take a toll on the people we are, and it seems both reasonable and just that we ultimately end up feeling the way we treat others. i find some comfort in knowing that we have the ability to control and influence these things.

(on the other hand)

large, sudden changes do happen, but they are not so much a matter of will (sorry Nietzsche) or power (sorry Foucault) or even necessarily faith (sorry Aquinas). in my own experience, doubt can be just as powerful as belief, and i would like to pause a moment to acknowledge Nagarjuna and his skepticism:

Nagarjuna, aka "the second Buddha"

the source of dramatic change seems to be utterly beyond our control, and this is a fortunate thing because it prevents our fears regarding the future from getting in the way of fulfilling our dharma...

something else my father taught me, using different words.