By Adele Hulse

After 25 years at it, snappy little lines of “Buddhist wisdom” slip so easily off my tongue. I can talk impermanence, non-attachment, dependent origination and all that high sounding blah blah blah with the best of them. I can pitch my lines to reflect the profundity of the ages or a sharp slice of ‘90s street-smarts; I can make them sound deep, wise, flip, tough, compassionate, in charge – like a lot of people I can trot out Dharma lines for anything.

They come out especially sweet when there’s no real pressure on. A little bit of mundane reality can make an awful lot of difference though. For example, the newspaper I work for is busy entertaining itself with some boardroom cost-cutting antics, which even tried to remove the paper towels from the toilets. Ah well, I said, smart and tough, that’s business. Then my job got cut in half. It was a cold winter’s day when I got the letter and somehow my know-it-all Dharma wisdom shriveled up like a dried pea. I went home and got into bed – cheaper than putting on a heater, though the cold I felt wasn’t only to do with the temperature. Most of my work is not about making money, so the job bankrolls everything else. It’s been running like that for years and years – now this.

It had been a long time since I spent a day in bed thinking hard thoughts. What were my choices: work for the opposition paper (there’s always an opposition paper), get a whole new kind of job, or give up entirely and just concentrate on finishing Lama Yeshe’s biography. Was fear of not having enough money really enough to stop me doing that? (If I had a dollar for every time people with substantial assets have told me how terribly poor they are, this subject would never arise.) “Don’t you ever work just to feed your mouth!” Lama told one of his students.

Heartened, I picked up the local center’s newsletter, which featured a small teaching by Lama Yeshe on refuge: “We have been taking refuge all our lives, though mainly in external things, hoping to find security and happiness.” Suddenly I felt incredibly secure and decided to just give in to the situation, but not whine about it either. If you do “virtuous work” and continue to mutter about the sacrifice, then you are making a deal with people, demanding their special attention as a reward, as recognition of your virtue. Thus generosity becomes completely undermined and you become a great pain in the neck as well.

So with renewed courage I tore into the work on Lama’s book, wrote ten pages a day and by night was entertained with the most marvelously clear dreams in which I chatted happily with all my favorite dead people. It is impossible to be unhappy while immersed in Lama’s life, and time flew. I work to a schedule because writing is hard, utterly isolated and completely sedentary. I take myself to the gym and at the end of the day spend a joyful hour in the local park with my dog and a bunch of dog-loving neighbors. It fulfills all my social needs.

Then two dogs hurled themselves against my legs while on a mad run and I fell over, putting my hand out as balance, promptly breaking it. Because I’ve broken bones before, I know there’s a point where you really have to decide whether there is a fracture or not and that is decided by pain. So you have to make yourself feel that, despite the fact that every instinct is to not feel it at all. Extreme pain is like extreme fear, love or anything else. But as soon as it appears it gets masked over so that the mind does not really remember it so sharply ever again. It’s a protection device of the human brain, designed I suppose to keep us on the lower planes where ordinary life is lived, keeping us dull, sage.

But the mind still knows it touched something remarkable, intense. We can also experience fleeting moments of intense love, joy, compassion, excitement. Through these we get a glimpse of our unlimited potential to feel all kinds of intensity through an infinite prism of angles. But the mundane world doesn’t like intensity, so it gets washed out, fades away.

My moment of revelation fades too as I rapidly turn into a useless smelly lump of plastered flesh, which can neither drive, type, cook, wash myself, etc., etc. One tiny bone and I am utterly undone. I decided to spend my convalescence asleep as a reward for having been a single mother for eighteen years and to avoid uttering more empty Dharmic platitudes and truisms.