THE HAMSTER WHEEL OF LIFE PROFESSIONAL

THE HAMSTER WHEEL OF LIFE PROFESSIONAL

For much of my time these days I feel like I’m running a small-scale recording and broadcasting studio, producing scripts, stage directions, backing tracks, and the like, then reassembling everything at the other end to create a (mostly) smooth and reasonably professional track. Of course, like so many others involved in planning liturgy, including many of you, this is a very different process from this time last year. I find myself, once again, preparing and planning music for this long but rich journey, one which countless composers over the centuries have immersed themselves in, producing some of the most expressive sacred music ever written. One of these bigger wheels is returning us seemingly to where this pandemic all started – Lent and its journey of struggle and hope towards the celebration of Easter, a celebration we had all longed for around a year ago when we thought this would all have passed by then. It reminds me of a sketch from the 1970s British comedy duo Morecame and Wise, though the comedy in our current predicament is definitely more ironic, if there at all for many of us! Wheels within wheels cycle through both the small- and the large-scale. It feels a bit like being on a great big hamster wheel that never stops spinning, but which always returns me to the same place. Days, weeks, even months seem to blur together and distinguishing one from the other becomes increasingly difficult, even with regular and immovable punctuating events. When we make a habit of meditation, we are then able to reconnect and reawaken to our innermost selves and realize freedom.I don’t think I’m alone in finding it all the more repetitive as this next lockdown stretches into the future.

Practicing being the 'alert witness' to our lives as opposed to simply letting life live us day in and day out. Reducing the chronic stress of our daily lives and training our minds to find the stillness. This is how we learn to quiet the mind and see with wisdom. By neither grasping or resisting life, we can find awareness and freedom even in the midst of our joys and sorrow. The Fourth Noble Truth is the path to the end of suffering, or the Middle Way - finding peace where we are in the here and now. The Third Noble Truth offers us a way out, the end of suffering or freedom (Nirvana), and The Second Noble Truth describes the cause of suffering: grasping. This First Noble Truth is what we are asked to take a look at, understand and transform. Collective suffering grows from human greed, hatred, ignorance, warfare and racism, isolation and torture, unnecessary world hunger, the destruction of an entire species of animals.

Our personal suffering can include anxiety, depression, fear, confusion, grief, anger, hurt, addiction, jealousy, frustration. Suffering is caused by our reaction to the inevitable pain of life. It's physical, biological, and social, woven into our very existence. Pain is an unavoidable aspect of the natural world. Suffering refers to conflict, fear, depression, stress, obsession, confusion, mental illness, divorce, trouble with work or the law, unfulfilled creativity, etc.- the basic stuff of life that keeps us from truly living a life we love. Suffering is distinct from pain.

'Suffering' in this sense is quite different from pain. One of the fundamental teachings behind Buddhism, its ethics, philosophy, practices and community life, is the discovery that freedom and joy are possible in the face of the regular 'suffering' of human life.

Stressed, unfulfilled, stuck? Do you have the feeling that there just has to be more to life than the way you are living it today?Īnyone who has had even the slightest introduction to Buddhist teaching is familiar with its starting point: the inescapable truth that existence entails 'suffering.' This is The First Noble Truth, one of the most central teachings of Buddhism.

The hamster wheel of life