I buy it with good intentions, but good intentions don’t preserve lettuce. It usually dies in my refrigerator crisper.
For years I ate a salad every day. Every. Day. Trust me, if you do that—or eat anything every day (except maybe chocolate, cheese, and bread)—you’ll get bored.
I ate salad because I told myself it was good for me, and physically speaking, it is good when you consider salad from its basic nutritional level (sans all the stuff that make it tasty, like croutons and ranch dressing, or if you’re in western Pennsylvania, French fries).
I also ate a salad every day because I told myself that if I didn’t, I would gain a whole bunch of weight and show the world what an impulsive, undisciplined person I was.
Because of other people. Yeah…that’s a reason to eat salad every day.
What is real and what is true are often different things, and I’ve learned over the years (thanks in large part to Buddhist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach) that undergirding what I believe to be real is usually fear, which is not easy to admit, let alone deal with. In the case of eating salad every day, what was true had nothing to do with outward appearances and everything to do with my fear of losing control of my body.
Here’s another example, something I experienced and wrote about in my personal journal prior to my hip replacement a few years ago:
“I woke up this morning feeling deeply sad and frustrated. I’d had a terrible dream, and it took me a few minutes after I woke up to realize it wasn’t real. Yet it set the tone for the morning.
“After breakfast, I put laundry in the wash, loaded dishes in the dishwasher, and started vacuuming. My left hip kept threatening to toss me on the floor with every step. When I needed to change attachments to vacuum the bathroom floor, I couldn’t disconnect one of the hoses. I tried, failed, and cursed a few times before I threw myself against the wall and cried. I thought I was crying because I couldn’t change the hose and because my hip hurt, but they were just catalysts. In and of themselves, hip pain and vacuum attachment failures wouldn’t make me cry. Make me angry, yes. But I also felt empty, and as I cried, I felt an even larger emptiness rise up; an indescribable loneliness.
“I took a deep breath and did a brief inquiry, and I figured out that I was crying because I couldn’t stop thinking about how last night, I witnessed a tender moment between an adult daughter and her mother. A simple thing, really. The daughter and mother were talking and laughing with each other in that way parents and children do when they truly like each other and enjoy each other’s company. I realized that what was true and causing the tears was not the hip pain and the vacuum snafu. That stuff was real. What was true was I miss my daughters and was frustrated that I don’t live closer to them, and I was sad that I don’t and will never have that same kind of intimacy with my own mother.”
Parsing that was hard, but it taught me a valuable lesson about my fear of facing tough truths.
Individually and collectively, when we cling to and act on what we think is real, but is not true—whether it’s our political, religious, or medical beliefs, or opinions of others based on their race, sexual orientation, or gender identification—it’s because of fear. What’s true is that it’s not possible to hate or disregard someone who doesn’t pray or look like you, or to take advantage of or purposely hurt someone, unless you’re afraid of losing something.
Imagine if those in power investigated their fears, and then acted within the scope of what is true instead of what they believe is real. The fear of losing money, influence, and control are at the forefront of many of their decisions and actions, and the damage it’s causing is going to take years to undo.
This doesn’t mean as individuals we are impotent. We have greater influence than we realize. Because our personal concerns and belief systems mingle and coalesce with the world, they affect the world in many ways, large and small. When we take personal inventory and contemplate what we think is real, and discover if it merely supports an ideology born of fear or if it’s actually true, we can act from a place of understanding and change our world.
Namaste, my friends. May we all be free from suffering.
Lynn Haraldson, Author and Writing Mentor 