Resolved: To Appreciate the Life I've already got

Rather than another one that I might have had!

Three weeks ago, Krzysztof and I opened the new Fire Philosophy year with thoughts on resolutions—intentions concerning how we might like to live this upcoming year. Here’s one that’s been on my mind and up toward the top of my list for several years now: that I have realized the extent to which regrets about the past tend to undermine my capacities to make strong moves in the present. It is essential, I realized, to actively appreciate my own life—all of it—no matter what it’s been. In what follows, I draw upon insights from Nietzsche and from Maezumi Roshi, a Zen master who many years ago was my own teacher.

No Regrets!

When regrets about my own failures and misfortunes begin to overwhelm me and my life just feels disappointing, I have learned to seek guidance from two of my spiritual heroes, the Zen master Maezumi Roshi and the German thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche. Maezumi Roshi once responded to my expressions of remorse for opportunities lost just as he had to many others at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Smiling gently but unable to resist the urge to tease me, he said that I had so far failed to appreciate my life. “Please encourage yourself,” he had written, “so that your practice is fully to appreciate this transient, frenzied life as the whole, self-contained, self-fulfilled life.” And Nietzsche, whose suffering and loss in life were exponentially greater than mine, came to believe that the ultimate challenge in life is Amor fati, to love your fate. Think of “fate” here as the simple, unchangeable “given.” What just “is” in life whether we like it or not. Self-pity, disabling regret, and disappointment that reality is the way it is or that the past was what it was were for Nietzsche clear signs of spiritual weakness. He wrote: “My formula for greatness in a human being is Amor fati, not just to bear the given, the necessary, still less to conceal it, but to love it.”

Excellent advice, of course, but I might have responded to these two slogans without serious reflection by saying “Oh sure, of course. I do appreciate my life. There have been amazingly good times, times of plentitude and success, times of friendship, love, and laughter. So I do reflect back on these with gratitude and appreciation.” But this shallow response wouldn’t begin to satisfy these two contemplative spirits. Maezumi would have just sighed in loving disappointment; Nietzsche would have scowled in open condemnation. They hadn’t exhorted me to appreciate and love the good things in life--the pleasures, successes, and victories. They had challenged me to appreciate the whole mess--pleasant and painful--and to love what can’t be changed no matter how debilitating it has been. They direct me to love it all--the good, the bad, and the ugly--because there it is--reality--staring me in the face.

But really, is that at all feasible? Love and appreciate my injuries and sicknesses, my humiliating weaknesses, my dishonesty, greed and egocentricity, and the numerous acts of cowardice by which I have hidden all of this from everyone? Am I somehow to love everything that I should have done but didn’t; everything that I shouldn’t have done but did? I cringe every time I bring any of these to mind. And even though I would very much prefer to be oblivious to all of these weaknesses of character and just pretend to myself as I do to all of you that they don’t exist, they come frequently to mind, often with a growing sense of disappointment. Regrets, guilt, and shame don’t necessarily outnumber the successes, pride, and pleasures in my life but they do weigh more heavily on me.

So if Maezumi and Nietzsche meant the whole of my life including the humiliating failures of spirit, the challenge is magnified enormously. But why should I appreciate the unappreciable; why even attempt to love the seemingly unlovable dimensions of my past, my character, and whatever life or reality has doled out?

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Dale’s essay continues below.