Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. ((rumi))

The rains have stopped, it almost seems unnatural; a Bangkok without spontaneous torrential downpours. We have now crossed into November, the dry season. Since the temperature never seems to fluctuate more than a few degrees, always dancing around 90F, there are two seasons in Thailand: dry and wet. I am happy to report that we are entering dry season, even though most of the country is very much wet.

There seems to be more and more babies in my neighborhood these days. Every time I walk out my front door there is a newborn being cradled by their grandmother or teen mom. I watch as the bellies expand and detract over the months and wonder about the lives these children are being born in to. I think about the kids at Mercy and how against all odds they are excelling in some of the best schools in the city and looking forward to university in their futures.

One of the hardest things for me to go against is my nature to look at every side to every given situation. Given the drastic discrepancy between the life I have been born into and the lives of those around me here, I can't help but wonder why. Yesterday, I picked up a copy of my friend’s book “The Pursuit of Happiness” written by a psychiatrist from the States about his conversations with the Dali Lama. One of the opening anecdotes related to Westerner’s need to explain everything in a scientific and rational way, eg: All our emotions and thoughts are the product of chemical reactions in the brain. The Dali Lama disagreed, stating, that if you always look for answers as to why people are the way they are and why the act the way they do, only considering this life time, then it is like saying you are looking for your keys in only one room of the house – you are setting limitations and boundaries. Buddhists believe in the notion of karma, one I find myself aligning with, regardless of the fact that I tend to side with tangible, explainable concepts.

The book continued with a discussion on depression and how to train yourself to seek happiness. It made me think about Jack Gilbert’s poem “A Brief for the Defense”. This poem is brilliant and Jack Gilbert is one of my all time favorite contemporary poets. I keep a copy of this poem in my journal and it has been with me my entire stay in Thailand. The poem is about the sorrow and misery in the world and yet how people are still happy and we must not deny our happiness and let the sorrows of the world weigh us down. If you haven’t read it, I suggest a quick google search while you’re thinking about it.

A favorite exert:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not staving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well.

This is not to say that we must ignore the realities of the world around us, but that we must insist on happiness. This has been a common theme in a lot of the reading I have done lately and I think it’s something many of us forget to do; letting ourselves slip away into a dark place in which we can no longer recognize the person in the mirror. Then the frustration comes when we feel guilty about being sad when we know rationally how lucky we are.

The mind is a powerful thing and we must remind ourselves that we have control over it. We can allow the weight of the world to drag us down, or we can ask, “What can I do to make it better?” The Dali Lama suggests the same: make a list of the things that make you happy and those that don’t and slowly try to do away with the things that make you unhappy. While it sounds very simple, it’s worth a try. And on days when you wake up and life seems like too much to handle, the list of what makes you happy will serve as a pleasant reminder that this is life and there will always be suffering of some kind and of some degree, but it’s up to us to remember just how fortunate we are.

We must admit there will be music despite everything. ((Jack Gilbert))

Thursday I will return to “nun camp” for the day to make offerings to the monks (how did they know I would be back?!) and next week I am off to Vietnam for a few days. I am blessed and I promise to remind myself of that everyday.

Off to make my list of what makes me happy and what makes me unhappy and start working on my pursuit of happiness.

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
((Elizabeth Gilbert))

The start of my "Things that Make Me Happy" list:

ABA