REsources for Living
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Have you ever had an all-out, meltdown, full-on temper tantrum? I don’t remember having major hissy fits when I was little, although if you asked my mom you would probably learn that’s more about my faulty memory than my good temper. I certainly have been witness to some raging temper tantrums as a parent. My daughter’s frequent tantrums in her younger years pretty much always grew out of wanting something that she couldn’t have—either because we weren’t willing to satisfy her desire, or simply because couldn’t find the thing that she wanted. Either way, you could watch her brain dashing around and around in a tiny little circle: “I want it! I don’t have it! I want it! I don’t have it! I want it! I don’t have it!”
From outside the little track her mind was racing around at top speed, it was pretty easy to see that she wasn’t getting anywhere. But I can tell you from painful experience that trying to use logic (“You’d be more likely to find what you wanted if you calmed down and looked for it.”) or consequences (“If you don’t go to bed now then you won’t be able to play with Savannah tomorrow.”) got me exactly nowhere, except more frustrated that my child wouldn’t listen to sense or reason.
The sad fact of the matter was that once she had reached tantrum mode, her mind was completely clamped on to whatever it was that she wanted, and there would be no letting go unless she got what she wanted or simply wore herself out. Sheertorture for everyone involved.
Luckily for all of us, she has pretty much moved beyond her tantrum years (and into teen eye-rolling and snarkiness). But I wonder how many of us, whatever our age, manage to work ourselves into the same state of desperately clinging to the idea that we simply must have something that is just not available. Maybe it’s a relationship with someone who isn’t ever going to feel about you the way you feel about them. Maybe it’s an image of perfection or wealth or beauty or fame that is slamming up against the reality of ordinary life. Maybe it’s wanting your children or your parents to be different people than they are ever going to be.
One way or another, it’s all too easy to get yourself hung up on holding on to things that you have no power to control. I, for instance, have been spending a lot of time and energy lately obsessing about the drought where I live in California, in spite of the fact that there is absolutely nothing I can do to make it rain.
Thousands of years ago the Buddha declared that all suffering arises because we are attached to getting the results and the things we want, because we hold onto our desires rather than accepting reality as it comes. We suffer when we expect things to be different from how they actually are. Many people have managed to get themselves out of tantrum mind by practicing Buddhist meditation, spending hour after patient hour practicing letting go, over and over again. Learning to let go, it turns out, is the work of a lifetime.
When you’re a two-year-old screaming because your parents won’t buy you candy, it’s awfully hard to find your way out of the need to clamp onto something that you can’t have. And it’s not so easy to let go as an adult, either. But there are ways to learn to loosen your grip. For instance, you can start asking yourself questions: What in this situation can I control? What can I do to make the situation better, even if it doesn’t come out the way that I imagined it? What can I have? Anything that lets in a little fresh air, a little possibility of change, can help to loosen that death grip on whatever it is that you’re holding on to.
Waterfall
For instance, although there is nothing I can do to make it rain, there are certainly things I can do to conserve water. Of course, my choice to put in drip irrigation, or collect the water that runs before the shower gets warm, or put drought-tolerant native plants in my yard, won’t stop the forest fires and the loss of the water that is needed for both wildlife and farmers to survive. It won’t have any significant effect on climate change, and the strong possibility that drought will simply be a way of life for billions of people around the world. The grief for these losses is real, and won’t go away if I just take shorter showers.
But holding on to the things that I can change, the choices I can make—finding new ways to live in the world that acknowledge the reality of things as they are—gives me just a bit of a chance to slip out of tantrum mind and let go of the way that things should be, so that I can put my effort into finding what I lost, or into making something new.
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