A few weeks ago, I started taking a boxing class with my friend Bela. I like it a lot. And now my forearm hurts.
This is the pattern lately. I’m at that age where it seems like every new activity brings some new bodily issue. I strength train more heavily, and my knees hurt. I walk a lot more, and my feet hurt. Boxing class, forearm. (And yes, the restless legs are still around. They get their own newsletters.)
Each time, I do the same thing. I take the ache and I freeze it. This is how my forearm is now. This is a thing I have. I stop experiencing a sensation that’s passing through and start managing a permanent condition, one I’ve diagnosed roughly four minutes after it showed up.
Ginny was listening to Joseph Goldstein, the Buddhist teacher, and she brought me a phrase of his. It comes from the Buddhist texts, and Goldstein says he loves it precisely because it’s a little odd in English: things are always becoming otherwise.
In every moment, things are becoming otherwise. He gives an example that could have been lifted from my week: he’s out for a walk, his knee starts to hurt, and his first thought is, “Oh—becoming otherwise.” It’s not a fix or a plan. Just a reminder that this is the nature of things. They’re unstable; they’re changing. And expecting them to be stable, he says, expecting them to stay the same, is a cause of suffering.
The Zen teacher Katherine Thanas said it another way: “Alternating is the reality of life.”
And I am constantly alternating. From tired to energetic. From sad to happy. From hungry to full and back again. Nothing about me holds still for long, and I know this because I’ve watched it happen for decades. But in any given moment, I forget it completely. I take one frame of the movie and treat it as the whole film.
My forearm hurts now becomes my forearm hurts, which quietly becomes my forearm is a problem, which, if I’m not careful, has me picking out my coffin.
The ache is real. I’m not arguing with the ache. What I’m arguing with is the frozen frame, the insistence that this moment’s version of my body is the permanent one. The wanting it to be different is where most of my suffering actually lives. The forearm just hurts.
There can be great relief in this. “Everything is unstable” sounds like bad news, but it cuts both ways. The good moments don’t hold still, true. But neither do the bad ones. The tired becomes energetic. The sad becomes happy. The forearm, left to its own devices and maybe a little rest, becomes otherwise too. I don’t have to fix the moment. I mostly have to stop nailing it to the wall.
Try This
This week, when something shifts on you, your energy dips, your mood drops, some body part files a complaint, try borrowing Goldstein’s response. Say it to yourself, ideally with a little amusement: “Oh, becoming otherwise.” You’re not fixing anything or pretending it doesn’t hurt. You’re just declining to freeze the frame. See what happens to the moment when you let it keep moving.
Reflect on This
What’s one thing in your life you’ve stamped as permanent that is really just today’s frame?
Hit reply and tell me. I’ll be over here icing my forearm.
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