Living in the Uh-Oh

thoughts on optimizing and resilience

Dear Dharma friends,

Let’s talk about preferences. In our lives, most of us are kept busy managing our preferences. We’re like sailors adjusting the rigging of a sailboat. A little pull here, a tug there, one more adjustment, it’s sure to do the trick. What I see are all of us scrambling around in the fantasy that there is an ideal setup where we will sail straight, and at the same speed, forever.

We have a name for this: optimization. We even congratulate each other on our ability to optimize. There’s Type A optimization, which is hitting all your comforts. Green lights in your commute. Your kid gets straight As, and is popular, and tall. Ha.

We hang our happiness on the hook of optimizing. If our commute goes well; our hair looks good; we get a promotion; our direct reports give acceptable feedback; we didn’t burn dinner; we didn’t yell at our partner; we slept well; and the morning’s coffee was good— then… we can be happy.

This keeps most of us living in a cascade of preferences. Because our preferences for comfort, for ease, are not all met, we are usually in some form of grouchy suspension. You can see from these examples, which are meant to be funny, that the idea that we can only be at peace when all of our preferences are met, is a delusion. Our happiness becomes flimsy, fleeting. Any wind blows it away.

In fact, I am reminded of the meaning of samsara, which is what Buddhists call the condition of our world. Samsara means to go in circles. Can you see that when we’re optimizing, what we are really doing is running in the hamster wheel of our many, many preferences?

A word we seem to like, lately, is resilience. We want our bodies to be resilient as we age. We want our brains to be resilient to resist social media. We want our kids to be resilient so they can survive the climate we’ve left them to inherit. Resilience is a useful word, so it bears pointing out that resilience is the practice of tolerating discomfort. It is the not-so-optimal state of living in the eek, and then living in the uh-oh.

Right before I was ordained, my teacher Anam Thubten invited me to do a solitary wilderness retreat. I’m a dharma teacher in the Nyingma lineage, which in my understanding is more of a Hermit in a Cave in the Mountains tradition, than a Monastic in the Civilization of a Temple tradition.

In fact, Anam Thubten had been inviting me to do wilderness retreat for almost a decade. I had ducked each invitation, at first making a joke (which is pretty accurate): “Thai women don’t camp!” I had a good few years when I was pregnant, then had a new baby. How could I pump in the wild? Then Covid and the wildfires gave me three more years of leeway. Finally, life came calling. When I agreed to take my vows, Anam Thubten said something like— oh by the way, why don’t you spend some time in the wilderness, alone?

I could think of no sufficient excuse for the honor he was granting me.

I agreed.

Then came the fear. I made lists. I made spreadsheets. I called friends in the Bay Area and borrowed gear. If you live in Philly, you probably heard me making white-knuckled jokes about dying in the canyons of Big Sur.

This would be my first time pitching a tent. I practiced in the backyard with my husband and our six year-old, who lent me his Swiss Army knife.

This would be my first time using a camping backpack. I loaded my husband’s up, and didn’t fall over. Carrying a boy and a toddler is great training for canyon hiking with a backpack.

I made peace with eating oatmeal every morning and pasta with sauce from a jar every night.

One California friend, who knows that I am not an outdoors person, asked if I was doing this of my own volition. “Do I have to be worried?” he said.

Another friend, bless her every day, agreed to pick me up at a stop on Highway 1 at the appointed time, when I would pop out of the canyon and re-encounter phone signal.

My husband promised to call someone who would ATV up to me if anything happened to our boys.

And off I went, into my great fear.

One experiment that I would like to invite you to try this week is to suspend your preferences. Try this for an hour, or for one thing. Start small: can you suspend your preference for dinner foods? For the oat milk in your coffee? Then grow bigger. Can you breathe through your kid being terrible at soccer? How about their report card? How about your work feedback?

The way to do this is with tolerance and kindness. Buddhists called tolerance, “equanimity.” It is the sense of witnessing the injustice of the world. It is an activated, watchful compassion. Less, “sucks for you,” than: “I see that happening to you and it could have been me or my kid.” True equanimity has an alive quality. Your heart is on the line.

I invite you to stop optimizing for an hour, or even a day. Drop your preferences. You can do this with humor. You could say, “While Sunisa has a strong preference for breakfast foods, EQUANIMITY is on the nameplate right now, and Equanimity doesn’t care.”

Remember not to yell at yourself as you do this. This isn’t a practice of nihilism. You can acknowledge how hard it will be to eat oatmeal every day this week, or sleep on the hot ground, or let your husband eat first while you chase the toddler. The quality of the kindness and equanimity that you give to yourself will also be what you manifest to others. Best not to force it.

I get asked quite a lot if Buddhism is a philosophy or a religion. We aren’t dogmatic, so can we be a religion? Buddhism involves faith and devotion for some people, so can we be a philosophy?

I think we’re closest to a bunch of scientists fed up with going around in the same circles. We want to blast our way out of the fish bowl. This is the exhaustion with samsara. It is a profound desire to be liberated. To stop telling ourselves that one more jacket, or vacation home, or trip to Europe will make us happy. We run experiments to see what improves the resilience of our mind. We practice living in the small discomfort, the eek, so that when life’s big discomforts come our way, we have some tools to meet the uh-oh

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The idea is that when you stop pulling at the rigging of a desire for comfort, praise, pleasure, and gain, you are not so pushed around. You are more steady.

We cannot please the gods of preference. We will never optimize our way out of the biggest discomfort of all, death. We practice tolerating small discomforts so that our resilience can grow for the times of sickness, of old age, of death.

I liked my time in the canyon. I love to be alone. In this stage of life I am almost never in solitude. I got to practice way more than I usually do. The night sky from the top of the ridge was the darkest, and the brightest, I have ever seen.

It was hard. It was humbling. I was fine.

Thank you,

Sunisa