It’s Your Choice

You choose your situation.

This is a claim that invites the allegation that I am blaming victims. There are thousands, likely millions, of people all over the world who are in horrible situations that no one would choose.

As is often the case, the Buddhist perspective is hugely different from the one most people bring in the United States. Where we can, we certainly should take steps to help people and to alleviate suffering.

But we also need to keep in mind the first noble truth, that suffering or disappointment is the lot of us humans and we only make it worse for ourselves without helping anyone else by worrying about situations we have no control over. The Dalai Lama well knows that most Tibetan people live under the vicious invasion of the Chinese and mostly make the news these days when they immolate themselves in protest, but he still looks like a happy person, not because he doesn’t care about his fellow Tibetans, but because he knows that happiness does not depend on external circumstances and he lacks the ability to reverse the Chinese invasion.

As Ajahn Sumedho puts the point, don’t take your life personally. It’s not about you. There is no you for it to be about. We mostly do not think very clearly about choices or what it means to make them. A common, mostly useless, concept in the modern United States is “free will.” Even though he was writing explicitly about Christianity, still the analysis of Jonathan Edwards from the 18th century is still logical and useful apart from his appeal to an…