"...this was Icarus drowning"--Andy

July, 2016.
Santa Ana metrolink station. Sun’s bright.
I’m out on the bench, in the sweltering sun, waiting for the bus to UC Irvine,
thumbing my worn copy of Montaigne’s Essays.
“An old Greek proverb says that men are afflicted by their ideas of things, not by the
things themselves…”
Yes, I thought - perception matters.
I look up. An old lady, nicely dressed, hobbles around the bus station. She’s carrying
not only her handbag, but also a bag of cherries - ripe black cherries.
She goes around the station, to strangers bent-double over their phones, and asks
“would you like so me cherries?” She receives death-glares in return.
“Another person down on her luck, probably due to poor life choices, and who
probably just wants some attention” I thought, and looked back down.
“... for if the ills of life enter into us only through our judgement, it would seem to be
in our power to despise them, or to turn them to good...”
Yes, I thought - we’re all ultimately responsible for our own happiness.
I look back up.
To my great horror, the crazy little old lady walks towards me. She sits down on the
empty side of the bench.
“It’s a fine day today - care for some cherries? They’re so sweet!”
No thanks, I say. Never acce pt food from strangers. I make a valiant, but pathetic
attempt to scoot away.
But she continues. “I’m on the way to the DMV to renew my driving licence - the
court told me to, because this damn bipolar disorder! For years they didn’t let me
drive.”
Silence.
The whirring sound of my inner cranial gears. “Oh, okay.”
“Where are you going?”
I hesitate, but spoke honestly. “I’m going to UC Irvine, to visit a Cell Biology lab. I
love biology.”
“You must be a bright young man…. You know, I had children like you. A girl, and a
boy who's your age. He’s valedictorian at his high school, but -”
I see her eyes well with tears.
“- but - he refuses to call me ‘Mom!’ He thinks that I’m just a freakin’ wreck of a
person!”
She starts sniffling, starts choking on her tears, but doesn’t stop.
“I’m still going to court against my boyfriend - about how he used to be mean to me
and sometimes would hit me, and then he left me! And he always did drugs! I told
him to stop but he couldn’t! I knew how dangerous they were because I grew up
using them, but he just wouldn’t stop!”
She grasps my hands tightly. I could feel her hands shaking violently, but then I
looked at mine, feeling her pain, and thought how I wouldn’t have the fortitude to
endure such things, either.
I thought of what I’ve read about the Buddha - a pampered prince, in a stately
pleasure-dome decree, banished from suffering, aside from the occasional scratch or
bruise.
Gets bored - sneaks out the palace, into the busy marketplace: all’s fun and games.
But then, lo and behold, an old man, wheezing, wrinkly, ugly, barely able to walk
upright.
A sick person, afflicted with God knows what - Plague? Cholera? Typhoid-fever? -
lying on the floor, wasting his life away.
(My foster dad tells me of his experience volunteering at a busy city hospital,
changing soiled diapers for distinguished professors and jazz artists and
businessmen who are reduced to a pile of intracerebral hemorrhage and cancer and
fecal incontinence - of what use is intelligence, talent, here?)
Then, the stench of rotting corpses - the hollow-faced mortal coils of men who lived
and loved and enjoyed pleasures and suffered pains. Sic transit gloria mundi:
memento mori.
Perhaps, I, too, growing up in a fairly well-to-do Taiwanese family with protective
parents and going to a nice high school and having lots of friends - should take a
sobering stroll out of my palace, too.
“I used to say there was no God, but now I do. He protects me! I know he’s on my
side when I argue in court! It’s like - it’s like - the armor of God! He’s always on my
side - I feel it!”
The bus arrives. I help her on the bus.
“You’re a nice young man!” she says. I blush.
On the bus, we talk about better days.
“Where are you from?” she asks.
“Near San Bernadino,” I reply.
“Oh, San Bernardino! Isn’t that near Big Bear? My father would always take us up
there to boat, or go snowboarding there!”
We talk about life, we talk about faith, we talk about friends. She spills the contents
of her bag over the seat trying to dig out a faded picture of her and a few friends from
the 80’s.
“How good is it to be friends, to have friends, to love your neighbor as yourself,” she
sighs.
Soon, her stop arrives. I help her gather up her spilt belongings - licenses, papers, lip
balm. “Thank you, young man.”
“God bless you,” I suddenly said - not out of devotion, but out of compassion. I’m not
religious, but I knew that God must have meant a lot to her, keeping her going
through those dark days.
“God bless you too.”
As she steps off, as the bus doors close, as the scenes of Irvine speed past me, I think
about the way of equanimity and the way of compassion, how we need to strike a
balance between knowing that we’re all responsible for our own happiness, and
recognizing the immense suffering that many experience on a daily basis.
I think of nibbida - disenchantment - we may live to pursue happiness, but which
will-o'-the-wisp shall we chase after?
Now, as youth, we may pride ourselves in our physical prowess, vitality, health, think
ourselves invincible gods - but what do we do when these glories fade and we bleed
our lives away into tubes, when family and friends and loves go, and die, or worse,
betray and weigh you down?
When materialism and being #1 and douce memories can’t save you, and you’re
confronted with your mortality, and infinite capacity to suffer - when not even faith,
belief, ideology, when they verge on self-deception, may ease your pains, what can?
What is beautiful, I do not know, and there’s so much to let go, to see through and
become disillusioned with, in our happiness-seeking endeavours, as we look past
superficial, fleeting - imperfect enjoyments, and reach on for more fulfilling,
substantive ones.
Am I ready for this? I don’t know.
And then, I felt a tear rolling down my face.