flemmings | (no subject)

My current Buddhist reading assures me that wishing for things to be completely different is a guaranteed shortcut to misery. This is true. I still wish things were completely different.

Mind, I've just been handed a salutary example of why one shouldn't wish for things like that. In my personal mythology, 2008 was a great year. I've been wishing it was 2008 again since about 2009. True the weather could have been better, but it was a cool summer, and I had fannish occupations, and so yeah, how much better than the painful summer of 2009 and the hot summer of 2010 and and and.

What I'd forgotten was that 2008 was a *wet* summer, given to rolling thunderstorms, and you couldn't step out the door for fear of being deluged. Memory had cancelled all those mad dashes to work in between downpours and evenings spent indoors while thunderstorms shook the windows. And while it was cool at times, the rest of the time it steamed: and today it's doing all of the above. So yes, I have 2008 back; and now I want to trade it for 2000.

(LJ won't let me post. The hell, LJ?)

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But surely in your example, this is a case of a wish based on inaccurate information. If your memories of 2008 had been fully complete (and there had been no rain that year), would it have been wrong to wish for it?

If I have this right, Buddhistically the answer is yes. Rejection of some present circumstance and the wish for it to be different = clinging to the desire to have things the way you want them. And that's the second noble truth- the origin of suffering is attachment.

Doesn't help that it's an impossible wish, of course. ^_^

I always used to keep my daydreams purely impossible ("and at this point I get beamed up to the Enterprise") because that way I was less disappointed if they didn't come true. :)

I never understood the point of possible daydreams. Seemed a waste of imagination.

And this, I suppose, is the side benefit of having a poor memory that cannot assign weather to a given year if my life depended on it. XD;

It's where your sensitivities lie, I suppose. Weather impacts me far more than anything else except possibly place. Events, of course, could happen any time within a decade or two; there's nothing to pin them down chronologically.