Richard S. Bogartz: Of balance and resistance
Published: 01-20-2025 10:11 AM |
Despite my efforts to avoid old people, primarily for fear they would die and fall over on me, possibly causing me to also fall even though I’m a mere 88, I managed to fall over anyway. Completely on my own. Alone.
There was a time when I would take at least one fall every winter. They were expected. Almost always on ice. Walking too fast. Or taking too long a step. Or just not looking at what I was walking on. I blame it on growing up in California. But now I am super careful when I walk in the cold outside. I never fall. Outside.
No, my fall was inside. Definitely a dramatically different fall, too. I had just turned off the TV and was about to turn off a space heater and the little light that allowed me to see where I was walking. Ordinarily, when I lose my balance, I do something with an arm or leg to regain it and at most I stumble.
But this time I found nothing to grab. And for some reason my feet were either blocked or oriented away from the fall direction, but they didn’t move. And so I simply toppled over, much like a downed tree. My right upper arm and my right hip took all of the blow. I think it was probably the hardest fall I’ve ever taken because I did nothing to break the fall. Just keeled over.
Strangely, the serious repercussions were in my left hip. And that didn’t start until the next day when the right upper arm also reminded me it had been a participant. My physical therapist and ibuprofen are helping me deal.
I hate the thought of sounding like a garrulous geezer who has nothing to talk about but his medical ailments. But hating your thoughts is old think. Last month I wrote about how events are simply what they are, the choice of qualitative labels is something we do, and the suffering we experience is our choice as to how to respond.
So I should stop being concerned about how my tale of sudden descent to the floor is received. That is your problem, although I reluctantly admit to complicity. My problem is the hating of sounding like a garrulous geezer. And perhaps, although I may not be ready to admit it yet, the idea of eventually being old.
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, taught us that the essence of suffering is grasping and aversion. He taught that it is resistance to the impermanence of reality that gives rise to clutching in order to keep things as they are, or shoving things away for the same reason, that cause us to suffer because inevitably we fail at trying to resist impermanence.
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Change is the most natural, inevitable occurrence in a world structured by impermanence. This reminds me of the time I toyed with “Don’t cry over spilt milk” to get “spillables spill,” then “breakables break,” and finally reached “changeables change.” Years later, with the help of Zen masters I’ve never met, I concluded that everything changes except the one constant, awareness itself.
We have then that resistance is the essence of aversion and grasping, and aversion and grasping are the essence of suffering. But we also have that some things appear to require resistance.
Racists. Control freaks, the most extreme of which are tyrants. Wrongheaded anti-vaccine advocates. The list is endless. Now the problem seems to be: Resist and suffer, or do not resist and someone else — and inevitably you — suffer.
There seem to be two sorts of answers to the problem. On the one hand we are offered: Go with the flow, the extreme form of which is the argument that this apparent existence is all a dream which by becoming enlightened you will recognize as such. So in the meantime, resist nothing.
On the other hand, there is: No, you cannot ignore the suffering of others, you must not ignore what is going on, activism is the right form of resistance, but you must actively resist without being attached.
ChatGPT suggests you will achieve this if resistance is based on clear values or principles, there is no obsessive clinging to specific results, the individual maintains emotional balance, actions are grounded in the present, with full awareness of what can be done here and now, and one is personally detached and focused on serving a larger purpose or truth.
So maybe I’ll try that instead of falling over.
Richard S. Bogartz is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an Amherst justice of the peace.