// A Buddhist scholar I know once explained to me
that Westerners mistakenly think
that nirvana is what arrives
when all your woe is behind you
and you have only bliss to look forward to.
But he said that would not be nirvana,
because your bliss in the present
would always be shadowed by the joy from the past.
Nirvana, he said, is what you arrive at
when you have only bliss to look forward to
and find in what looked like sorrows
the seedlings of your joy.
And I sometimes wonder
whether I could have found such fulfillment
in marriage and children
if they'd come more readily,
if I'd been straight in my youth or were young now,
in either of which cases this might be easier.
Perhaps I could.
Perhaps all the complex imagining I've done
could have been applied to other topics.
But if seeking meaning
matters more than finding meaning,
the question is not whether I'd be happier
for having been bullied,
but whether assigning meaning
to those experiences
has made me a better father.
I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys,
because I did not expect those joys
to be ordinary to me. //