Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

It was more than bereavement. It was a kind of sawing dissatisfaction that cut back and forth against the fibers of who I believed myself to be. Sometimes even in the sunniest moods I’d be aware of it. Turn your eyes away from the good life for just a second and there it was: not depression as much as an ugly little doubt about everything you had ever done; not confusion, exactly, but a kind of lingering question.

When they were in their twenties and thirties, we’d all be close. . . . But by then they’d have their own lists of concerns and duties, their own oil changes, doctors’ appointments, and business meetings, maybe their own kids. Very possibly their careers would pull them a thousand or two thousand miles away, leaving Jeannie and me to grow old the way my parents had, buoyed by a phone call once or twice a week, flowers on Mother’s Day, hectic visits. Why were we all so proud of a style of living that splintered the family like so much dried-out firewood?

In New York, over the course of the month of August, you go from the feeling that summer will never end, to the feeling that it has.

When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable.

For many people, many, many people, the spiritual situation is like that of a young boy who decides to take up the piano. This boy likes the piano, likes the sound the keys make when he touches them, likes the feel of the ivory against his small fingers. Perhaps he knows someone, or

has seen someone, who plays well, and this inspires him. As he grows older, he continues to play and to practice. As he practices perhaps someone criticizes him in an unkind way, or perhaps he begins to see that he cannot play as well as the person who inspired him, that he makes mistakes, that his hands do not always work the way he wishes them to work, that it requires effort and sacrifice to improve. By the time he is a young adult, he is somewhat accomplished at the piano—some of this came from natural

ability, some from his love of music, some from practice. He plays well, sometimes at gatherings of friends or family. But then, as he grows older, he decides that, even though he can play well, he will never play very well. He will never play perfectly. He is not good enough to be a concert pianist, just as, in the spiritual realm, on this complex earth, he believes he will never be good enough to satisfy ...

Probably he does not even form these thoughts i...

just sets up, between him and the next level of piano playing—the next level of his interior life—a kind of invisible barrier. He makes a limit where there is no actual limit. This is not bad. He is not an evil man. Just the opposite, he is a good man, but he builds this limit the way you would build walls around a room, and then he lives there, within that room, not completely satisfied but not knowing what he can do about his dissatisfaction. He grows old. He waits for ...

the way life is, he says to himself. This is as good a player as I will ever be. He would, in fact, like to play the piano better, but what keeps him from venturing outside that room is a kind of fear, the idea that he might fail, that people might mock him for his ambition, or that he would then not be the person he believes himself to be. But where did this idea of who he actually is come from? In the spiritual realm, or, if you prefer these words, in the emotional or psychological realm, what is he denying himself by staying inside these walls? I set...

“Work out your own salvation with diligence.”

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that

“Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. People make the armor from their smartness, or their anger, or their quiet, or their fear, or their being busy, or their being nice. Some people make it from a big show, always talking. Some make it by being very important.

Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.” “Or remain neutral.”

But God is just giving out love and giving out love and giving out love, like a . . . like a very nice music always playing. If you hurt people you make yourself deaf to this music, that’s all. Not God’s fault, your fault. Not God’s judgment, your choice, you see? You make yourself no chance to feel God, or the moon going up, or any good love. Life after life you make yourself no chance, and then one life maybe you start to change, and be a little quiet inside, and listen to this music that is always there—for you, for the

Our family love wasn’t immune to the subversion of time. Something was changing us with each breath, each second. The delusion of youth was that you believed

you’d never reach middle age, and the delusion of middle age made you believe you could go on more or less indefinitely the way things were. Yes, the kids would grow up. Yes, you’d grow old and eventually pass away. But, really, there were so many pleasures to be had between now and then, so many tennis games, so many meals, so many weeks at the Cape and the ski lodge, so tremendously much to do before that other stage of life eventually set in.

was a dependable method by which a person could lead an ordinary life, cherishing the ordinary comforts and pleasures, fulfilling the ordinary familial and professional duties, and still be able to make the transition from here to who-knew-where when that time came. And make it at peace.

Watch life do its thing, watch the end of life do its thing, and try to go toward the good side when you could see