A Happy Ending for All Beings
Antitheses of a Happy Ending
Recently, while scrounging around in my satchel of subconscious beliefs, I discovered something interesting: presently, I don’t believe I deserve a happy ending.
This came after a night fraught with strange dreams. In one, I was troubled by the prospect of lifelong singlehood. In another, I knew the moment I laid down to rest, I would never reawake. My head remained calm in the latter; death no longer incites the terror it once did.
Ghosts of connections past came in vibrant color. Their smiles were as natural and loveable as ever. Even the mew of a barn cat my ex-fiancé and I briefly adopted came through clearly. My mind grasped at our connections, aching for them back, but I was aware these were just dreams. Underneath, I couldn’t be perturbed.
When I finally woke, the rush of the “real world” whisked me away. Yet all through the morning, I was adrift in curiosity about these dreams.
Why now, I wondered? What were they trying to tell me?
Hit by a Realization
Several appointments and real-world stressors later, I was in yet another conversation, moving through yet another motion. This time the conversation was with one of my loving guides.
“The outcome is never good when things keep going like this,” she told me in reference to the health markers I’ve been sparring with. “But when we reverse course, there can be a happy ending.”
Those words—happy ending—hit me with the force of a freight train.
In its shotgun fashion, my mind burst into a spray of associations. I was thrusted back to childhood, when fairy tales felt tangible and I dreamt of being in movies. Writing a book. Getting married. Traveling abroad.
Then, suddenly, I was huddled in a corner, sheltering myself from the violent, cruel, and demeaning ways others showed me I wasn’t good enough. Regardless of what I did, even if it was my very best, I failed to meet expectations.
Over the years, those expectations became my goalposts. My raison d’être. The metrics that kept me moving.
But I kept “failing” to meet those arbitrary goalposts, and the people in my social circles never let me forget. For years I gathered critical remarks from peers and my family, wearing them like stripes on a uniform jacket. Success lost its shine altogether.
I could no longer be convinced that any part of me was precious.
So Much For a Happy Ending
Once I took on the identity of failure, I let go of hope.
I basically felt sentenced to suffer. That was my only possible reality; hope and the idea of happiness took on mocking qualities. Very young, I anticipated that stress might be the thing that kills me.
Forget a happy ending, I decided. I couldn’t even envision a life beyond high school.
Yet here we are. It’s more than a decade after that arbitrary expiry, and I’ve amassed millions of moments and memories to prove it. The cosmos has continued to manifest this life-form called “Annette,” despite my struggle with understanding why.
Out of seeming necessity, I ventured away from the traditions and mindsets that raised me. I challenged myself to start loving the world at large, even if I couldn’t wrap my head around it or name a reason why I’m here. This challenge sent me searching through world philosophies, where I finally found existential mana in the East.
As such, my understanding of life, death, hope, fear, happiness, purpose, and love—to name only a few—has taken an entirely new shape. Yet ignorance still lingers as my own karmic classroom, which is what inspired reflection on this whole notion of a “happy ending” today.
A Blessing for All Beings
In Buddhist practices, there is a phrase used for cultivating maitri (loving-kindness). Its simplicity is beautiful:
May all beings be happy.
This can be used as an affirmation, a prayer, a mantra, or a meditation on Oneness. For me, it’s also a reminder of every being’s right to peace. When someone is engaged in an activity that makes no sense to me (or that I found downright irritating), I recite the phrase to humble myself back to equanimity.
So is the essence of loving-kindness: to act in such ways that every being is supported on their quest for contentment. Our love and nonjudgment encourage the freedom in which happiness can thrive.
There’s something hypocritical about my recitation, though, isn’t there? For it specifies all beings. Not every being except Annette.
I may be churning the ether with loving-kindness for others, but the exclusion of myself invariably puts up a blockade.
The Self in the Shadows
Somewhere, somehow, most of us branch off from the All. We learn our names, our numbers, and our positions in the community; we accumulate unique factoids and personal histories.
In a word, we become our own entities.
And depending on how one is raised—how one learns to interact with the world—a great divide might grow in perceived worth. Past harms sucker onto our egos, taunting us with the false narratives others bestowed.
As a child, for instance, I was taught I was asinine. For many years I wore that cloak of asinine-ness, burdened by its ugliness. At some point I believed it so sincerely that the flaw became my own, manifesting as insecurity and self-doubt…
…then ultimately became fodder for this belief that a “happy ending” would never be my own.
In others I continued to see beauty; I reveled in their progression, self-assurance, and triumphs. That divide between “them” and “I” grew ever-wider.
Just like that, I banished myself to the shadows.
Existential Interplay
The thing is, there’s no foundation for separateness. It’s a complete and total illusion.
Even as I lived in the shadows, the sun shone somewhere high above me. For in fact, without the sun, a shadow could not exist. Daylight and cover coexist; they depend on one another. They are inter-processes of the universal show.
I took on the shadows of my past “lessons,” conditioned into believing I was somehow other in this whole play. The worst. The most vulnerable. The dumbest. The biggest failure. The cruelest. The most insane.
Not that I knew it, but at any time I could have stepped out and discovered sunshine. I could have seen how Annette is a parcel of All and happiness was my birthright, my being.
But the truth (and the coolest trip in all this) is that I was never actually lost. Even as I muddled about in the dark, I was still looped into the greater picture.
The greater picture that, I surmise, amounts ultimately to a happy ending… no matter which trails I took.
A Happy Ending for All Beings
The Buddha postulated in the first Noble Truth that suffering is inherent in an ordinary existence. Impermanence—particularly when it comes to our temporary ego-forms—sparks controversy and clinging behaviors which turn the mind into a slave.
Circumstances beget our suffering. Our experience becomes indoctrinated with the worldly way. We forego peace without even realizing it, just as I ousted myself from the divine universal play.
With metrics constantly shifting, and our accomplishment as human beings tethered to them, it’s little wonder we lose sight of loving-kindness. We rarely carve out time or effort to challenge the all-too-comfortable forms of our beliefs. That’s how they can go on remaining hidden for so long, as I recently realized within me.
May all beings be happy. An internal whisper, a mantra, a wish for the human race.
Whatever it is to you, fellow life-traveler, may we communally remember that “all beings” includes you and me.
We are deserving of such love and acceptance and grace.
♡.﹀﹀﹀﹀.♡