WHY I’M NOT A BUDDHIST ANYMORE

 

I'm not a Buddhist anymore. I thought I should tell you that, so you don't hear it from the TV.

 

The last few years I meditated to 'calm the mind'. An especially hyped result is to 'live in the moment'.  That's the point of all the sitting on the ground, the breathing in and out, the counting.

 

I started looking for all these things because of the nutsiness in Western civilization.

 

Define nutsy? Sure:

 

Sugar free, sodium free, oil free Raspberry Vinaigrettes—not just one, or two, or sixteen, but an entire aisle full of these products. This is more than nuts, it's mass insanity.

 

So I tried breathing in and out, counting.

 

But, I'm not a Buddhist anymore. I figure lots of people 'live in the moment' without any calmness whatsoever—the average three year-old, for example.

 

But let's pick on a much bigger victim, like Indonesia. Their language doesn't have a future or a past tense; so they live in an eternal present. That does not  mean they're any good in a crisis. If you fall off a building by accident, just pray it's in Stolkholm and not in Jakarta, where instead of emergency calls and first aid, you'll get blank, frozen faces staring at you.

 

No past and no future leads to no options.

 

For the last weeks I've been in Bolivia. No one—I mean no one—relaxes into the moment as well as Bolivians.

 

Yesterday we were all in a train wreck (a million Bolivians, and a handful of Westerners). Guess who panicked?

 

Bolivian ladies crawling back into the upside down train, ass first, to retrieve dime store sandals.

 

So, thankfully, finally, irony does serve a purpose. Once you realize you're not dead, it lifts you high up above the wreckage to have a good laugh.

 

Sometimes it lets you turn your problems into a story.

Observations, After

©2008 Sorrowland Press and all respective artists within.