The nobility of the second noble truth

Maybe Hawkeye (from M.A.S.H.) said it best, "There are two rules of war: young men die and doctors can't save them." Well...I guess that would need to be flipped just a bit--there are two rules of life: everything changes and no one can stop that. I have been recently forced to confront the second noble truth of Buddhism head on: life is suffering because of grasping/clinging. The reality: well I lost something that was very near to my heart. I'm still not entirely sure why it happened, but it did indeed happen. The nasty truth of everything that I have experienced is that NOTHING, not even the most seemingly stable thing on the planet, is permanent. Anything can be snatched from you in the blink of an eye. Just when life seems bland and boring, something completely unpredictable happens. Yes change is unsettling, especially as you become landed in your rut, but something unseen happening is also exhilarating. Maybe the best example of what I mean here, at least from the books that I've read, is Chuck Palahnuik's Survivor. There is a girl in there who can see the future in all instances, everything that is going to happen in her life and the lives of everyone else. This would be cool, initially; but after a while I think most people would get so extremely bored by the consistency. Then at the end of the book, this girl finally meets the guy who actually surprises her--throws her premonition a curveball. That one instant, that one momentary break from monotony made all of this girl's pain throughout the book worth it.

I am also quite certain of another truism, which has been reaffirmed many times for me in the past several months: everything happens for a reason. I am today a product of everything that I have experienced and everyone that I've interacted with, both good and bad. It's impossible to quantify exactly what impact any single person or thing can have on one's life--if not indefinitely then at least not for a significant period of time. I do, however, see some of the effects that this thing that I lost had on my life. I'm doing a complete self-inventory, trying to discover what it is that is important to me and what I want to get out of my life. For whatever reason, the circumstances landed me where I am today. Bitterness has been a very close friend for the last week and a half, as has despair and longing. Indeed, I'm still not entirely over anything that has happened; but I'm pushing on. Again, this journey of self-discovery invariably would not have been possible without this incident. Since I was a little kid, I always disliked gambling because I hated losing money. But sometimes in the game of life, risks are necessary. I took the single biggest risk of my life, gambled with what was most important to me. I lost in the material sense and for that I am truly sorrowful. In the larger sense, however, I believe that I have gained a lot. Under the circumstances, I don't think any other option was available. That is not to say that I didn't have a choice (I'm certainly not a determinist), but each choice I believe led to the present predicament. It just seems that the other road would not have been laden with the proverbial "diamonds in the rough" that this one has been. Maybe, someday things will settle and the things that I think I lost won't be so lost, maybe not. I hold no pretenses, life is not, after all, exactly like Twilight; although, Jacob Black is pretty damn cool ;)

And while I'm learning all of these things, gaining all of this insight (chalk that up on the life experience board), it doesn't stop the horrible pain that lurks just around the corner. Some days are better than others, but some are just outright nightmares. I feel like I lost two things at the same time. I see why things had to be this way...sorta, yet, at the same time, it makes absolutely no sense to me. Part of this is inevitably me still trying to cling to some remaining remnants, whatever those may be...