Everyday Stillness- 13- My Story

Day 13 My Story There is suffering,

And there is the ending of suffering.

There's a moment when life brings you to your knees,

Not to pray,

But to break.

And if you're lucky,

That breaking becomes the opening.

Mine began with a flying shoe.

In hopeless fury,

I kicked out my leg at life.

So hard did I lash out that my shoe flew from my foot and crashed into the bedroom wall.

It's all suffering.

Everything's suffering.

Why can't you see that?

I screamed at my wife.

I was finished.

Utterly broken.

Irreparably so,

It seemed.

My journey into Buddhism began in the middle of great struggle.

I was so happy when I meditated,

But miserable at work.

Me,

A working-class boy who was never meant to stand a chance.

Here,

Unhappy in surroundings I'd once dreamed of.

I came from a mining village in northern England.

Poor by national standards,

And in that tiny pool of poverty,

We were somewhere near the bottom.

Out of four class grades,

I was in class three,

The one just above the lowest.

My school reports were a joke.

As I became a teenager,

Things grew worse.

I felt worthless.

At night,

I'd dream of owning a Harrington jacket.

The latest trainers my best friend wore.

I wanted so badly to feel like he did.

To walk with pride,

Instead of hide in shame.

That deep sense of lack became a fixation with clothing.

One that,

Oddly enough,

Would serve me in later life.

My early working years were spent in dead-end factory jobs.

Life was so bleak that I even failed the interview for the village mine.

I wasn't even good enough to go down the pits.

It seemed I was destined for failure at every turn.

Still,

I was born at the perfect time,

At least for me.

Born in 1970,

I was nineteen when the second summer of love exploded across England.

The rave scene.

My first ventures into nightlife were as miserable as my start at school.

Shabby eighties nightclubs.

Cocktails.

People sitting in lines on the dance floor to oops upside your head.

I never felt invited,

But I had music.

Real music.

Music that spoke to my life.

That was free,

On the radio,

That no one could take from me.

The specials,

And bands like them,

Sang about growing up without.

About surviving in low places.

The ritzy.

The only half-decent nightclub near me.

Sold drinks I couldn't afford.

Played music I loathed.

And was filled with girls who could sense the pauper in me from across the floor.

All of it deepened my sense of being shut out of life.

Yes.

Life.

You weren't about to get any better for me.

But you did.

To tell the rest of the story in full would take a whole book.

But let's just say there were nights of belonging so beautiful they split me open.

Like the working class kids of the northern soul era before me,

I'd found meaning through music.

One wildly hedonistic night,

My friends and I made a pact as we drove to the Hacienda in a beaten up Citroen 2CV.

My mate had bought it that day for 80 quid,

Just to get us to our Saturday night release from a week of misery.

The car was so knackered we had to look for puddles on the way home to refill the steaming water tank.

You can't back out,

Ian said as we rattled through the Snake Pass with warning lights flashing.

I know,

I said.

We worked together in the factory.

We weren't driving home to rest like the other clubbers.

We were racing back to start our shift at 5.

45am.

We worked in a freezing food factory.

The temperature inside was minus two degrees.

We wore big blue fleece onesies to stay warm.

But the cold still bit to the bone.

It reached in through the boots and stung from the metal toe caps.

We kept the pact.

We left for the land of love,

Ibiza.

That brought its own struggles.

But my god,

It was beautiful.

I met people there.

Mostly university students.

And I realised I was just like them.

Class barriers were breaking open and that was down to the music.

I remember sitting by a pool,

Dazed but dreamy,

After another ecstatic night.

Thinking,

I'm not going back to that factory.

Not a chance.

I wanted to become something.

I had a ticket to university now.

I thought,

I want to be happy.

And I'm a philosophical person,

So I'll study philosophy.

But that old longing for fashion still burned in me.

A longing born from years of lack.

So I went for fashion.

To be a designer.

They were gods in the 90s.

Everybody wanted to be a fashion designer.

The summer season ended.

And I found myself on a plane,

Coming back to cold,

Grey England.

And after that endless summer,

It was so crushing.

It felt like waking from a dream into a nightmare.

But in me was a fire that had to burn bright enough to light my way.

At the interview for fashion college,

I was hopeful.

Did you get A level art?

The lecturer asked.

Sorry,

I didn't get any A levels,

I said.

Hmm,

Can you draw?

Or sew,

She asked,

Incredulous.

I can't,

I said,

Shame flooding back.

But what makes you think you can be a fashion designer?

Have you got anything at all to show me?

Er,

I made this,

I said,

Thinking on my feet and pointing to my sleeveless denim jacket.

You cut the sleeves of a denim jacket?

That's it?

That's all I have.

By some grace,

She saw something in me.

Okay,

You have until Christmas.

Two months to prove to me why you should be on this course.

If you don't,

You're out.

Thank you,

I said.

I won't let you down.

I left with my head in the clouds.

I'd made it.

I was going to be a fashion designer.

Accepted and loved at last.

Those two months were heavy.

My classmates laughed at my drawings.

My pattern cutting was a mess.

I couldn't sew a straight line.

By Christmas,

I still couldn't.

But somehow,

I scraped through.

Then I worked harder than I ever thought possible.

A year later,

My illustrations came to life.

The eyes I once drew wild and crazed now looked out calmly,

Clearly,

As if saying,

Now you see me.

My classmates and teachers were stunned.

A year ago,

I said you'd never be an artist,

My teacher told me.

How wrong I was.

Wow.

I had climbed from the bottom to the top in just one year.

Painting became an obsession.

I danced with watercolour,

Not knowing where the images came from.

My classmates planned lazy nights with films and food.

I said,

No,

Let's do some illustration,

Let's paint.

They started calling me Mr Motivator.

I graduated,

Missing a first by just three points.

I thought I'd made it.

Milan,

Fame,

Success.

But like all art graduates,

I was in for a shock.

There were no jobs.

I felt betrayed.

So I took another leap in the dark and left for London.

Against all odds,

I made it as a fashion designer.

The only one from my course.

The boy who started out as a joke became the one who smiled.

All of this,

This hell of a journey,

All so that one day I could find myself screaming about suffering to my wife,

While living my once impossible,

So hard-fought-for dream.

I'd made it.

And most of what I'd made was misery.

Work wasn't working for me.

My low self-worth had followed me through the light,

Hiding in a corner I couldn't see.

But it could see me.

Now obsessed with Buddhism,

I wanted to go and live in the monastery I'd been visiting.

Life outside of it was too painful.

What I didn't know then was that I had ADHD,

The same disorder that had driven my best friend to drink himself to death at just 49.

Buddhism saved me in many ways,

But not before it tore my world in two.

My outburst that night came because my wife refused to see how black the world felt to me.

She couldn't meet me in my suffering.

How could she?

She didn't carry the same disorder,

Or the same class-shaped wounds.

The Buddha's Four Noble Truths are simple.

There is suffering.

We cause our own suffering through craving.

There is a way out of suffering.

The Noble Eightfold Path is that way.

I had misunderstood the teaching.

I was trapped in the First Noble Truth,

Blind to the Third,

The truth that through our own effort we can be free in this very life.

Oh,

To be free from the self-created storms of the mind.

We worry because we forget our strength.

We imagine things will be worse than they are.

But life is far kinder than we give it credit for,

Even when things turn out as our darkest imaginings.

We still have time to work them out.

And if we take these catastrophes with courage,

Seeing them as part of the great curriculum of growth,

We can rise through them.

We've all heard of PTSD,

Post-traumatic stress disorder.

But have you heard of PTG,

Post-traumatic growth,

The other side of trauma?

We can grow even as our body fades.

Whether we grow or wither depends on where we place our focus.

The ego trembles in fear.

But if we dig deep into truth,

The ego begins to fall away.

And as it does,

Light fills the space it leaves behind.

That is real letting go.

Not clinging,

Even to life itself.

Not reviving the past.

Not hoping to be in the future.

Instead,

With insight,

See each arising state.

Not craving after past experiences.

Not setting one's heart on future ones.

Not bound up with desire and craving.

The Buddha.

It can sound nihilistic,

Negative.

As if we no longer wish to exist.

But it isn't.

It's the middle way.

Awake.

Vibrantly alive to the unfolding moment.

The mind.

Free from craving is a mind full of joy.

We struggle because we think excitement is happiness.

Or that peace without stimulation is emptiness.

The opposite is true.

The more we empty ourselves,

The more we discover we are full.

Full of unending joy.

Because what we let go of was never truly ours.

And what remains is our true nature.

Vast as the open sky.

Work works for me now.

I no longer see it as a saviour or a way to prove my worth.

It's been a wild journey to reach this point.

And I no longer long to live in a monastery.

I'm happy where I am.

Still human.

Still caught at times in the storm.

But finally at peace with this wild and beautiful life.

Tomorrow I'll talk about happiness that comes from meditation.

And how,

Although I experienced it,

I wasn't clearly seeing why it arose.

That insight took another decade or more to mature.

So I'll see you then.