Make Yourself at Home in the Unknown

A lot of people are in crisis right now. It may be a large-scale crisis about the circumstances of the country you live in. You may be living in the aftermath of an earthquake or destructive fire. It may be a crisis in your local community. Or a family crisis, like a divorce. It may be a personal health or financial crisis. If you are not experiencing a crisis right now, I’m happy for you – take a nice deep breath. If you are experiencing the stress and challenge of some type of crisis, you should also take a nice, deep breath. Crisis or no crisis, breathing is a good idea.

And for those who are facing a crisis, I will be posting regularly over the next ten days about coping with a crisis based on wisdom and principles from Japanese Psychology and Buddhist philosophy. I’m currently finishing up a new book on Coping with a Crisis and I’ll being sharing some of the content from that unpublished manuscript in advance. I’ll also share some content from two other books that have been published: Tunneling for Sunlight and The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology. I’ll be publishing this material on Substack as audio segments with either matching text or written commentary.

So let’s get started with the first segment.

Segment #1

Maxim: “Make Yourself at Home in the Unknown”

- Dzigar Kongtrul

We are most at home in our own home. We have arranged everything according to our preferences. And when we come home from the movie theater or dinner at a friend’s, we know exactly where everything is. Because we feel at home in our home, we also give ourselves permission to relax. We may leave our socks on the floor or an unwashed glass by the sink. For many of us, even if our home is simple, or small, it represents comfort and security.

A few years ago my teenage daughter and I arrived in Naples, Italy. We had never been there before and had no idea what to expect. We didn’t know the layout of the city. We didn’t know where to eat. We didn’t speak Italian. We found the train station and took a train to the ruins at Pompeii. When we got off the train, we had no idea which way to walk. Everything we saw was new and unexpected. When you go on a trip like this, you can have an adventure, because wherever you go is the unknown. So you become curious, attentive, interested, and open to new experiences.

Yet each day of our life is truly unknown, even if we are at home or going to work. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what surprises await us. We don’t truly know how the day will unfold. If we could view each day as an adventure, we could naturally become curious, attentive, interested and open to new experiences. But, too often, our experience is just the opposite. We encounter something unexpected and we become tense, stressed and uncomfortable.

If we can think of our home as something beyond the building we live in we might be able to relax into our adventure like it was a trip to Naples or Pompeii. Our life is like a mystery novel. What will happen next? We don’t know! We’re not supposed to know. Let’s just sit back and see what the next page will reveal. Let’s find a way to enjoy life without knowing how the story will end. We can participate in writing this chapter of our life. But we can’t control the outcome. So each time we turn the page, we can encounter these new developments with curiosity. The nature of an adventure includes moments of tension, surprise, disappointment and even fear. That’s what makes it an adventure. That’s what makes the novel worth reading.

From Tunneling for Sunlight: Twenty-One Maxims of Living Wisdom from Buddhism and Japanese Psychology to Cope with Difficult Times by Gregg Krech (2019, ToDo Institute).