There is something that comforts when i think about the ideas of doing things on my own and staying here and waiting things out. I realize that in the long run it could hurt me to stay but I have 6 months of probation to try and figure this out so i have time. i know this city, this state is toxic. I know No matter what I do I'm going to have to deal with the consequences of all the actions I've taken here. But there is something that comforts about this city. My City. My Scene. My Life. My Love. its not just the good times or the friends or the family. Its in fact the opposite of all that. It is the bad times and its the enemies. Its the devastation I see all around me, when I drive around the area. Like this toxicity is what keeps me here. I know its not totally the case but its part of it. But I think of my drive cross country a few years back, to see a friend. And I think about the peace it brought me. I think about fact that I could go anywhere in the world and make new friends and experiences and leave this all behind because that is just how things are and need to be. But then I think about the fact that I can't, having no marketable skills and and that fact that I'm struggling here let alone any where else. But i want to prove people wrong, including myself. I just don't know how and the peace of mind I need is to infrequent at the moment. I need something big to happen here and I need it soon. I just cant keep struggling with all of my issues and taking things one bite at a time. It leaves me with an impatience and urge that makes one step at a time inefficient for me. I know the story of the tortoise and the hare should be a lesson that I look at right now and that persistence and patience will pay off in the end but its hard when things are as dire as they are for me.
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To the extent that you are doing the first thing, I think that's very healthy. But it sounds from what you're saying like you're doing a fair bit of the second thing. Now, if life is meaningless, and death doesn't hurt, that makes sense. Why not go out with a bang?
But I don't think you really agree that life is meaningless. If you did, you wouldn't care about your grandmother. You wouldn't care about the situation in Detroit. You wouldn't remember your road trip fondly. All of these things are things about life that are meaningful.
Master Shantideva said something that I always find inspiring. It's going to seem a little bit off-topic in this context, but bear with me. He asked us to consider the situation where someone comes to us and beats us with a stick. Who do we get angry at?
The obvious answer is that we get angry at the person who beat us with the stick. But why does that make any more sense than getting angry at the stick? Why is the person beating us with the stick? It is because they are angry at us. They are as helplessly controlled by their anger as the stick is by their hands. So just as we do not get angry at the stick, we have no reason to get angry at them either. Our true enemy is anger itself.
What does this have to do with repaying kindness? This: you are experiencing a lot of bad shit in your life right now. This is causing you pain. Your pain is just like my pain, just as your anger is just like my anger. The pain is not okay, for me, just because it is you who are feeling it. So when I act in hopes of reducing your pain, I am really being selfish, because I am fighting my own enemy: pain.
So the kindest way you can repay me is to take up the battle with me. To act against the causes of the pain that you are feeling, so that you feel less pain, and perhaps someday you are entirely liberated from your pain.
So why am I fighting your pain, and not my own? Am I free of pain? No. Of course not. But it happens that, according to the Buddha's teachings, and to Jesus' and Saint Francis', when I take up the fight against your pain, I am also fighting my own.
If you look at St. Francis of Assisi's famous prayer, the one in that lovely song that Sarah McLachlan did for the season six finale of Buffy, a naive reading of it is that we should just sacrifice our own happiness for the sake of others' happiness. But that's not a correct reading of the prayer. In fact, as you noticed when you brought food to that homeless man, being kind to others brings a special kind of joy.
We are taught in our culture to look out for number one. It's so pervasive that when I first started practicing Buddhism I had this weird realization that I'd finally been given permission not to be an asshole anymore. That I'd actually internalized an entire complex of behaviors as I was growing up about "not being a chump," and that these behaviors were making me unhappy, and hurting the people around me.
So what do you do next? I don't know. What do you think about this teaching from Master Shantideva?
By the way, when you say that you have no marketable skills, I'm curious - do you have skills that you don't consider marketable? I guess you aspire to be a tattoo artist, and you've been working on drawing, but is there anything besides that that you find interesting? I think becoming an artist is somewhat underrated as a profession, but I know from friends who've gone down that road that it helps to have other things to do that you love along with your art.