Post #205: It Doesn’t Matter (But It Does)

3 Oct. 2026

“One should be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Crack-Up” (Esquire, Feb. 1936)

     Anything happening right now is as it is and cannot be changed: so why torment ourselves endlessly by resisting and rejecting it? Because, one might say quite reasonably, we are creatures programmed for survival and procreation, meant to anticipate opportunities and forestall threats, not to be contented with how things are.

     A good answer, so far as it goes, but with troubling implications: for it means that whatever welcome or necessary changes we might be able to make, we are bound to find fault and be discontented anew in the improved position. Or to put it in terms of our programming, our settings are evidently optimized, as a result of long evolution, not to peaceful enjoyment and contentment even of the most favorable conditions, but to endless chasing, even if it be after wind (no. 75). Hence the Buddha’s stark verdict that the entire realm of sentience is, and must ever be, the realm of Dukkha—whether it take the form of raw misery, or of more subtle forms of dissatisfaction when we either do not get quite what we want (as must always be the case) or else when we must suffer what we do not wish to face at all.

     Forward movement and development there must also be in the world of sentience and impermanence, but wouldn’t it be nice if it could come from equanimous insight and wisdom rather than desperate need, from love rather than from anxieties that can never be fully pacified, or hungers that can never be fully sated? Then you could focus all your energies on taking right actions within the tiny domain that is truly within your power, and leave the rest to take care of itself. Epictetus’s red line of demarcation between what we truly control and what not (Encheiridion 1); the Bhagavad Gita’s insistence (nicely summarized in Gandhi’s 1931 essay on “The Message of the Gita”) that we only have a right to our doings only, never to their fruits, as we so vainly imagine; pious Christian surrender or equanimous Buddhist renunciation; they all seem to converge around a similar notion of how we should relate to the world with detachment, as pilgrims and witnesses, not owners of anything we encounter.

     And yet how far from our reach such a way of life seems to be, most of the time! How much we are driven through life by hankering after results, and how feeble our aspirations to purity in action can seem by comparison. How much the shadow of craving and clinging follows us wherever we go, and how forbidding a program is the equanimous acceptance of the moment (or more precisely, of the thoughts and sensations it brings)! Take your ordinary, creaturely sense of self along, and such equanimity is barely even conceivable, let alone practicable as something to live by. And yet, what can feel entrenched to the point of being altogether inescapable, may turn out, upon inspection, to be more tenuous than it seems, though still confoundedly difficult to slough off. Perhaps no effort can shake it off at will, and it must wait, as the most ancient Buddhists Scriptures counsel us in the Sutta Nipata (1.1), for the day when it can be shed as naturally as a snake leaves behind its worn-out skin, lest we make a bloody mess by tearing at it prematurely.

     Meanwhile, even with the itching old skin still firmly in place, we may occasionally catch glimpses of how things might look from a more dispassionate point of view, though properly sustaining a no-self perspective is another matter. Even such passing glances can be enough to make a lasting change in the equation of life. Of course a lifetime’s habits cannot simply be undone at once, to say nothing of the aeons of creaturely evolution whose record all organisms carry in their very cells; but much more remarkable than the difficulty, or the remoteness of the other shore, is that such alternate vistas can come into view for ordinary worldlings at all.

     The very characterization has a paradoxical ring: no specific situation ever matters much (it is just what it is, as I said above), but your actions (including the “merely” mental ones) always do. How so? Because the former is and can only be the reality of the moment, which must be accepted no matter what, on pain of terrible suffering if we cannot, or will not. But this does not doom us to inactivity and passivity because the next action we take (ideally not from craving and aversion, but from wisdom and mindfulness) will become the stepping stone to another moment, which, though it must again be accepted as unconditionally as the previous, will bear the marks of whatever we imprint on it by the purity of our efforts, however subtle and hard to discern it may be. The world at large can never be fully set right this way, but it can be made better one thought and action at a time, provided it be done without straining after rewards. (The trouble being not in the longed-for results, but in our orientation towards them.)

     Alas, in describing such far-reaching prospects there is always the danger of sounding as if one were boasting about one’s ability to live by them. But no, not at all: I do rather poorly at it, by the standards of a serious practice, and I pay the attendant price in misery. But then no I can ever get with such a program, that is precisely the point; and how far the I-perspective can be sensibly supplanted, not by way of mere posturing or pretense, but at bottom, remains the biggest question that anyone must face who takes the promises of the Eightfold Path at face value.

     I know only too well, alas, how frustrating and discouraging it can be to struggle with one’s sittings (and the practice more generally) feeling that one is simply no good at the whole business. Yet the remedy is close at hand: with as much dispassion and compassion as you can muster, make a habit of watching yourself suffering on the mat as a useless meditator (or so it may seem to you) and in the very act of falling short (by your own estimation) you will turn into a good meditator (by the logic of the practice). Or to put it a little more correctly, it is the habit of detached observation, however imperfect, not what one happens to observe, that makes the meditator—good or bad, in this context, being judgements best avoided altogether.

     So keep observing the waves of dissatisfaction and discomfort arising, softening a little, then coming back, as if they did not belong to you. (Go ahead and change them, if you can.) If only you persist, capably or not, you will gradually develop a bit of observer’s distance to the wretchedness that is self-attachment; and a bit more, and more, until one day you may discover with a smile that perhaps you are not as hopeless a case as as you feared, nor as frustrated as you were before the mat became your friend, or at least your friendly enemy.