Oh, and also, don’t be fooled. It’s totally fine to not want sex every day of your life.
Next stop: clarity. Because remember that moment we talked about way back in the beginning of the book, where the young Prince Siddhartha stood strong in his values, put his hand on the earth, and said “No, thanks” to the demon Mara, thereby attaining a kind of final steadiness right in the middle of the storm? That clarity was not just something the Buddha accomplished in one single moment; it was something he cultivated, step by step, every moment along the way to that final moment. Likewise, we can all set ourselves on a similar (though certainly not identical) path of daily clearing stuff up as we learn to ride the waves and weirdness of our particular storms.
STAY CLEAR
Craig
The final piece of advice the Buddha has to offer on how to feel valuable and whole and happy while the whole wide world burns is simple: don’t get drunk.
Whoops. I just felt a disturbance in the force: hundreds—no thousands—of readers around the world putting this book down and picking up their iPhone.
Well, just to keep things interesting, and since I’ve never been one to back down from a bad argument, I’ll throw in another one:
Don’t get high, either.
Don’t shoot heroin, don’t smoke crack, don’t crush pills up into itty-bitty piles of blue powder and then blow them up your nasal passage for that lovely little head rush of self-dissolving bliss you’ve been waiting for since Thursday morning. Also don’t smoke weed and don’t sniff glue and don’t take your dad’s prescriptions and don’t drink entire bottles of cough syrup and watch your face melt in the bathroom mirror.
Don’t do any of these things. Or the Buddha will be mad at you.
Just kidding. Well, not about steering clear of substances that cloud the mind, gunk up your judgment, and generally make you less able to adequately live the life you most want to live right now. Not kidding about that part. Just the Buddha being mad part. He won’t be mad. He died years ago, after all.
So what’s the deal? And what’s it got to do with staying grounded right in the middle of the tornado-like maelstrom of information, culture wars, technology, politics, overwork, underpay, and your neighbors who won’t turn the music down at 3 a.m.?
Well, maybe it will be helpful to talk a bit about my own process with all this.
YEARS OF LIVING HAZILY
I hail from a family of alcoholics. All three of my parents (dad, mom, stepmom) drank heavily when I was young. All three of them were sincerely and thoroughly invested in what I think of as the “mystique of intoxication”—this backward, highly branded, advertising-infused assumption that getting sloshed is somehow part of the good life, that it’s sophisticated even, and that it brings people together.
I therefore grew up simultaneously horrified by their behavior—screaming matches, drunk car accidents, extremely poor financial decisions—and yet also somehow sold on the underlying premise that getting drunk was pretty cool. I associated alcohol with being relaxed, with sex, with good times, and with lavishly talking to people at parties that, looking back, I never really wanted to be at in the first place.
I’m astonished and a little dismayed to report that this sort of beleaguered thinking lasted a very, very long time for me. Even after many small and big lessons on why alcohol is not such an obvious winner, I continued to drink to ease social anxiety, take the edge off at the end of a long day, and, more to the point, just because it was somehow inexplicably a part of who I was—an indispensable allocation of my cultural heritage.
Until it wasn’t. Because very gradually—and this process took years—as I saw that getting drunk led to more regrets than fond memories, I stopped getting really truly toasted. And then, very slowly, something fundamental shifted. I started to notice that the kind of relaxation that alcohol provides is, in essence, a sort of dullness. As I gradually fell in love with the clarity of mind that comes from meditation and mindfulness, I slowly cut down on those moments when drinking alcohol seemed like a thrilling proposition.
Finally, I was just down to drinking on special occasions and at fancy restaurants when one day I realized, sort of all of a sudden, that alcohol and celebration were not, in fact, one and the same thing, and that I could celebrate the heck out of something or someone without getting a little tipsy. So I pretty much stopped.
These days I barely drink at all. I mean, if I’m at someone’s house and they’re drinking wine, I’ll have a glass with dinner. On a wild night, I might even have two. But I rarely drink at home and I can’t remember the last time I got drunk. Unsurprisingly, my life feels no less sophisticated, my connections with others have only improved, and when I say or do stupid things, I have no one to blame but my own bad mental habits.
Still, there will be a loss. Whenever we give up one socially sanctioned behavior for another perhaps-less-socially-sanctioned behavior, there is a loss. Some friends will not cheer you on; some friends will, in fact, keep drunkenly handing you Long Island ice teas until you awkwardly decide to leave the party. And yet. Other friends will appear in their place. And you will have the presence of mind to know them to be good friends worth hanging out with. Or good friends worth having sex with. Or good friends worth marrying.
Okay, yes, good story. But what does all this actually have to do with staying steady in the midst of everything?
THREE GOOD REASONS TO STAY CLEAR
Staying clear is the last important guideline the Buddha offers. It’s a bit different from recommending that we don’t kill or steal or lie or misuse our libido. But still, it has important implications. Let me break it down for you. If you don’t get drunk, the following things will happen:
You’ll make fewer dumb mistakes.
You’ll have more clear moments.
You might be surprised.
If you quit drinking alcohol you’ll make fewer dumb mistakes. This is just a simple fact of life. You won’t lose your phone because you’re drunk, or pick up a three-hundred-dollar bar tab because you’re drunk, or have to deal with your heartbreak and self-disgust after getting drunk and sleeping with your ex whom you can’t seem to stop texting on Friday nights when you get home a little sloshed and can’t remember how bad you felt last time you did this. Then there are the affairs that happen when you’re drunk, or high, or blasted on cocaine. And the DUIs. Or just the hurtful things you say to your partner or friend or sibling that you wouldn’t say if you were calm and focused and not three-and-a-half drinks into an otherwise pleasant celebration of their birthday.
So you’ll make fewer dumb mistakes. And dumb mistakes, it turns out, account for a whole lot of the energy that we throw away on the spinning orb of crazy we call our lives. Really, truly, when you stop making dumb mistakes—verbal mistakes, sex mistakes, spending mistakes, other mistakes—you’ll notice how much more vitality you have for what’s important to you. Like making a positive contribution to the people around you whenever you can.