Hello, you.
How is your mind today?
Yes, I know this is an odd way to start a conversation. It’s not small talk. It gets to the heart of the matter, and nudges you in a way I want to nudge you. Your mind is important. How is it today?
I don’t like the standard opening as much: How are you doing? That put the emphasis on the outside world. It’s important for me to distinguish between the inside world (your mind) and the outside world (people, the affairs of life, your physical surroundings and comfort). The outside world will keep changing. It isn’t under your individual control so much. But the mind is only under your control. In fact, you are the only one who can say how your mind is directly. How it is experienced?
Our mind is our safe harbor. Terrible things can be happening in the outside world. We, ourselves, can be hungry or cold or mistreated. But there are those in the world where the outside world doesn’t invade their mind as much. To quote various writers, they can feel the pain, but not the suffering.
There is another, unfortunate pattern to the mind that we don’t like to admit. Underlying most everyday happiness is suffering. Put more starkly, getting what we want is awesome, but unreliable. That unreliability is the suffering.
For a long time, I mostly got what I wanted, out of relationships, sex, money, etc. And, while the high lasted, it wasn’t too difficult to feel great. If asked how my mind was, I would have said, “My mind is great. I have a great life. Good girlfriend/boyfriend. Good sex. My job is stable. I have lots of friends. Plenty of money… always good to have more but I have enough.”
Rereading that, I now notice I started it out with a lie. My mind wasn’t great. It was getting what it wanted. There’s a big difference. And when some roadblocks popped up, when something didn’t work the way it was “supposed to”, my mind went to very not great. It panicked about what is wrong, or how I could change things. It was also afraid of losing what it had. I would go to the gym to maintain my body in good condition. This is generally a fine thing to do (maintaining our health is helpful). Eventually the body will fade. So let us not neglect that we can develop the following skill: having a mind that could deal with my body not being in a good condition, deteriorating.
My mind was not like that. I was in denial. My mind is not like that. But now I’m no longer in denial. I’m just starting to get to work.
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