We all know what it is like to be in an environment we do not want to be in. A job that feels unaligned. A relationship that has been off for longer than we have admitted. A house we cannot leave yet. A season of caregiving nobody chose. To feel out of sorts and out of control of some aspect of our lives or of other people. We all know the suffering of having our emotions throw us into a state of chaos, or of being so shut down and so separate from others that we are an island of isolation.
When Leonard Cohen writes, “If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day,” I do not know what he meant by it. This is how it lands on me now.
Seasickness is what the body does when it refuses the motion it is already in. The deck moves and something in you insists on a floor that is not moving. Sailors call the recovery getting your sea legs, and it is not a matter of gripping harder. It is the moment you stop bracing and start moving with the boat.
Suffering, in the Buddhist sense, is the inability to accept the reality of what is. Becoming the ocean is saying yes to the experience we are actually having. Not that we like it. Not that we chose it. Not that we stop working toward a reality that is more suitable, more life-affirming, more desirable. It is that this reality, in this moment, does not magically shift into something more desirable simply because we internally reject it.
Accepting the reality of being on the boat is not fatalism. I can decide never to travel by boat again. I can check the weather next time so I am not buffeted by storms. I can imagine a thousand other versions of the future in which I am not out here at all. But right now I am on the boat, and it does not dock until it docks. If I do not adapt, if I refuse the reality of this moment, I have added my refusal on top of the crossing. That is the extra suffering, what Buddhists refer to as the second arrow. It is also, often, the only part of the suffering that we have any power to alleviate.
Anyone who has been knocked over by surf knows the two options. Brace, and the wave takes your feet and rolls you along the bottom. Duck under it, and it passes over you and you come up on the other side, in the same water, still out of your depth, but upright. The wave does not care which you choose. It is coming either way.
And salt water will hold a body up. Not a body that is fighting it. Floating is not a thing you do; it is what happens when you stop doing the other thing.
There are other vessels out here, and there are people on the shore. Some are standing on it right now, dry, and one day we will be standing on it too. The error is in reading someone else’s shore as a verdict on our crossing. They have had their own weather and they will have more, and measuring our middle against their landfall does nothing at all for the swell we are actually in.
One caution, because this is the teaching most easily turned into a weapon. Said to the wrong person at the wrong moment, accept the reality of what is becomes stay. Accepting the reality of what is is not an indictment to stay. Accepting that the water is cold is not agreeing to stand in it. Seeing exactly what is happening is what makes it possible to change it, and refusing to see it is what keeps people in the same water for years, waiting for it to warm up. What is left, once the arguing stops, is just being in the boat.
And sometimes, loosening the grip of wanting things to be different, we may even find the beauty in the challenge. I have a medical condition that kicks in when I stand too long and leads to significant tachycardia, a pounding, fast heart rate. For my body to find its way back to normal I must sit down. When it first showed up I was miserable, because every break was a subtraction from what I had intended to get done that day. Once I accepted that this was my body and these were its limits, the breaks stopped being subtractions and became the meditation. Time to pet my dog. To sit on the back porch and feed the squirrels out of my hand. To put my back against a tree and be in communion with it. None of that was ever on the list, and I would not have had a minute of it if the day had gone the way I wanted.
The weather is not negotiable. The bracing is.
The line is Leonard Cohen’s, from his novel Beautiful Losers (1966).