From Inconvenience to Emergency

  It is sometimes the case that the minor inconveniences of life might start to seem overwhelming. The simple idea of not having a stable internet connection, or having a cellphone where one can speak into it but not hear, can become daunting. However, I remind myself that these are affluent problems, and these problems are not so terrible as one might think. It's very interesting how the mind often goes into emergency mode when faced with these relatively minor experiences.
  Why does that happen, I wonder? I am reminded of a book I read quite some time ago by Franz Kafka called The Trial. This book describes the plight of Joseph K., a man who is put on trial for a crime for which he seems completely unaware. The book describes how Joseph K. tries valiantly to find the answer to his crime through a rather unfeeling bureaucracy, and is later murdered at the end of the novel. I am not sure what this situation symbolizes, but it has resonances for me. One of them is that it sometimes doesn't matter whether one has actually done something 'wrong' or not. The point is how one responds. If a person is frantic and starts to believe that they are damnable or condemned, they will create their own prison from their mind state. If one succumbs to the view that they are culpable for something without really understanding why or how, they also create a suffering. The latter is a different kind of prison: the prison of not knowing, or perhaps a kind of wilful ignorance. Yet another hell is that of continually desiring an appeal, under the sometimes mistaken belief that someone will take on their punishment or have pity on them. These three sufferings seem to correspond to the three kleshas in Buddhism.
   Perhaps the best way to understand these experiences is to view them in light of the truth of suffering. No matter how well a person plans our her or his life, there are bound to be things that fall through the cracks from time to time. Of course, one can avoid this altogether by having few responsibilities in life, but it turns out that this reduction of responsibilities does not resolve the problems of life. For instance, if a person decides to slow down and not take on any new positions in life, they might first feel extremely relaxed and at ease compared to their previous frantic pace, but soon habituation starts to set in. At that point, even the simplest responsibility one has can turn into vexation, as a person starts to become so relaxed that they might forget to do the simplest thing or procrastinate. In this case, it is not the task itself that generates stress or vexation; it is, rather, one's own attitude toward the task. If instead of trying to ditch responsibility altogether, I focus instead on my attitude toward them, this can go a long way in terms of helping me better cope with what needs doing. This attitude is: don't magnify what needs doing, and don't blow inconvenience out of proportion. These things are only temporary, and they are phenomena...there is nothing inherently or substantially real, when they are the result of arising causes and conditions. The second attitude is that, even if one doesn't perform the task up to an inner standard one has, this doesn't reflect badly on the person at all. In fact, the person doing the action is not entirely responsible for everything that could arise in a situation. These points shift away from seeing the self as 'solely' to blame when things don't go as expected, and toward seeing the task as conditioned.