One of my all time best movie moments is when Jack Nicholson barges into a psychiatrists office, leans into a crowd of waiting patients and asks, ‘What if this is as good as it gets?’ I’m certain it is a question we all avoid thinking about until the point where it cannot be ignored. I heard it back when I was in college and wondering about what I could possibly make of my life. I was about girls and DJ’ng parties and being a college-town entrepreneur and writing it all down in composition notebooks and maybe, just maybe waiting for a woman to make me want to be a better man.
I asked myself that question that day, head held high in the sunlight. I’d ask it again, years later, in the darkness. Every time the answer shifted–with maturity, situation, state of mind. It led me to an inexorable conclusion: We are slaves to our emotion and circumstance, suffering the indignities inherent in both. As Buddha writes, suffering is life. It sounds dark on the surface, but just below it reads like a hint of salvation through the promise that suffering is not all there is but an aspect of life that reflects back as joy.
Life is also change and trying to avoid change is how you end up in a psych doc’s office asking random patients to consider if this is as good as it gets.
I know the answer now… It isn’t.
Some Thoughts:
- Not much to say about ’46. We are still a hundred years away from the brunt of the good stuff. It is worth noting that this was the year Neptune was discovered. There’s that.