According to the adepts of Zen Buddhism with whom I used to sit zazen (meditate), Buddha's basic two commandments were not Love Your Neighbor as Yourself and Love God Above All (other) Things. Those two directives were what the nuns taught me in the tiny, crowded classrooms at St. Ann's grade school, five decades ago when I was disguised as a tyke in Cincinnati.
The Buddha's basic duo is more factual statement than dual command.
Buddha said Life is Suffering and Life is Change.
Now there's no question about disbelieving those two maxims if you have lived at all.
No matter how pleasant life can be, and sometimes it can be wonderful, we know that certain things are going to come along and knock our life-train off the tracks. There are thorns on the prettiest rose bushes and cores in even the sweetest apples.
Life is good, but it certainly contains suffering.
As to Part Two of Buddha's claim, there is no one who avoids change.
You may avoid suffering until late in life, keep your parents into your 40s, marry the absolutely right per-son, have wonderful kids, and even like your job. But even if all those things are true, other facets of your ex-istence will be changing. Constantly.
As someone who moved here in 1984 and loved the place as it was then, along with many other refugees from the Middle West, I can tell you Seattle, although still likeable, is not the city I moved to 20 years ago.
If Kurt Cobain had shown up here today playing grunge, instead of 15 or 20 years ago, I'd bet a gold record he wouldn't have become famous.
The music scene is different today, and the streets are not full of kids climbing off buses with guitar case in hand. Seattle is yupped up, not grunged out.
Leaving aside the attempted glitz-ification of Seattle, I'm just pointing out that the place has changed.
I had burgers the other day at the Two Bells on Fourth and Bell. The burgers are still great, and "the Bells" is still a nice spot. But it is a very different place from when I first walked in there in 1988.
They still have some local art on the walls, but the place was once a hotbed of artists, writers, musicians, and the marginally employed - folks who made Belltown Arts Central in Seattle.
Now most of the old apartments are gone or condominium-ized, rents have skyrocketed, and computers have generally replaced canvas as the medium of choice for the upper-scale denizens of the community.
I hosted the spoken-word series for Two Bells for three years in the mid-'90s and watched helplessly as the neighborhood changed, the Two Bells knocked out a wall and expanded, and the crowds for drinking grew while the audience for poetry dwindled.
The then-owners, who loved the neighborhood the way it had been, begged me to stay on, but I finally gave it up as bad job. People - most people, anyway - had had enough of the Seattle Poetry Scene.
The Title Wave reading series in Lower Queen Anne, which I co-founded in 1994, is gone. So is Title Wave, for that matter.
There are still readings around town, and some excellent poets, but poetry no longer holds the high ground in the bar scene where once every other joint had a reading, or so it seemed.
The arts scene has changed. Not better or worse maybe, but very different.
Everything changes.
Except us.
People.
Oh, we get older. We notice gray hairs and slackening midsections. Eventually we even die.
But the way we live, the human we are at our center, seems almost totally resistant to change.
For example, take the presidential debate the other night.
The incumbent, a man who brags he doesn't read anything but his Bible, latches on to three or four buzz phrases and repeats them ad nauseam.
He can't accept a divergent opinion and so talks over anyone who isn't a yes man or yes woman.
But his opponent, the senator from Massachusetts, can't seem to loosen up.
He argues coherently, marshals facts more ably than his opponent, but his attempts to show vigor (a famed Kennedy trait) stop at aping old JFK and Bobby's haircuts.
And it's not just those two power-hungry gents.
Friends who have certain problems with their wives get divorced and a few years later are having the same problem with a new, totally different lady.
People who were addicted to alcohol become addicted to religion.
We are a strange species.
Dr. Siggie Freud, arguably the most important theorist of the 20th century, said once in response to a questioner that a person who entered psychoanalysis with a real determination to change might shift his or her personality 10 percent in a lifetime.
Freud saw that as tremendous change, and if you think about anyone you know, 10 percent seems mind-boggling.
And yet it's still only 10 percent.
I was a counselor-facilitator in the state of Washington, working with convicted felons for two years two decades back.
Studies were done. States that didn't provide counseling for violent offenders being released back into the societal tidal poll showed a recidivism rate of more than 80 percent. States that did provide counseling and followed up on the inmates after they got out, cut recidivism down to around 75 percent.
That's five per 100.
Seemed worth it to me then to help. And still does.
Five per hundred is 50 inmates per thousand released.
Fifty (mostly) guys who clean up their act with help and no longer clog the courts, no longer prey on innocent folk.
Yet and still, it's only 5 percent.
What is it about us that doesn't allow us to move out of our comfort zones except on rare occasions?
More than 90 percent of the voters polled have said they are already convinced who should be our next president. Debates, facts, none of it matters.
We are a species who know what we know even when we are shown we don't know it.
Life is suffering and change, but people are amazing and strange.
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