Dear Lloyd:

At 17, March last year,  ten months ago, you wrote: “I know I will probably be a practically different person a month from now- just like I was a month ago”.

You then wrote about your “urgent duty to try and heal the wounds of the world”, this “borderline obsession.. with mass suffering” that caused you to lose your passion for music. You lost sleep over it one night, consumed by thoughts, “and suddenly.. it feels like everything’s falling apart and I’m losing the will to even live because the world feels so hostile.. a world so corrupt, so greedy, so angry, so miserable, so unequal, so alienated from what makes it beautiful”,  and the struggle is completely hopeless”.

I asked you on that thread to share about your suffering in your individual life, and you answered: “Indeed like everyone I experienced my share of suffering as a child that has followed me like a shadow to this day”, you mentioned wounds and a baggage (“my wounds.. the baggage I carry”), but you didn’t give any details about the nature of your wounds and baggage.

Ten months later, January 2020, you posted a new thread regarding a different concern: your family’s mortality: “I spend most of my interaction with my mother contemplating how this could be the last interaction.. so worried all the time”.

You clearly read and practiced Buddhist principles, resolved some issues using Buddhist principles (other issues in my life.. are now largely resolved mostly by Buddhism!”), and tried to use those to ease your worries: “I can’t settle in a Middle Way between clinging and apathy (a compromising being non-attachment) because both extremes stress me out so much.

My thoughts this Tuesday morning:

You wrote in March last year that you will “probably be a practically different person a month from now”. I say we people remain amazingly the same throughout our lives because our brains are formed by a certain age, and all the most powerful neuropathways (what we learned about ourselves and about life) were formed and set in our first/ early second decade of life. We live the rest of our years and decades with that same formed brain.

New learning is of course possible at any age. The difficulty in practicing and being helped (and helping others) using new learning, such as learning principles of Buddhism, is in unlearning what we already learned early in life.

This is what you learned earlier in life about the word: “so hostile.. corrupt.. greedy.. angry.. miserable.. unequal.. alienated”- not in these exact words, a child doesn’t have this vocabulary. This vocabulary is added on later in life, as you read books and such. As the child that you were there were feelings more than words. You wrote it yourself: “the world feels so hostile”.

You suffered some injuries, the wounds you referred to, and it hurt. And you got scared of feeling that much hurt. Not wanting to feel that hurt again. Next, you want to feel better, to make sure you will not experience that early, personal hurt again, so your problem-solving brain attached that fear to famine ten months ago, and more recently, it attached that fear to mortality.

But your personal fear is attached to what caused it in your individual life. Your wounds were not hunger/ famine wounds I imagine. For a child, not being seen or heard, not being noticed for a long, long time is wound enough, it feels bad enough for the child to not want to feel that badly again.

If you want, we can have a conversation about these things, including the principles of clinging, non-attachment and middle way as they apply to feeling better and healing.

anita