Life is hard.
Just ask Goga Ashkenazi.
“’Like most working mothers, Goga Ashkenazi finds it hard to juggle everything,’ says Julia Llewellyn Smith in The Times’,” an article posted on Facebook stated.
“The 36-year-old Kazakh oil billionaire now has a second career as a designer having bought the fashion house Vionnet. This means she spends weekdays at her ‘bachelorette pad’ (a 17th century palazzo near her atelier in Milan), while her sons, aged eight and four, stay in her London mansion, which she bought for £28M in cash.
“The boys each have a live in tutor. ‘Of course, I miss my children; of course I have thought about them being in Milan,’ she says. ‘But there are no schools here.’ London does have schools, but with certain drawbacks. ‘These British school holidays are endless. That’s all I do, organize holidays’.”
There is more, but you get the picture.
Life is hard.
No matter who we are, where we live, what we have, we can find a way to be unhappy, or at least unsettled. It seems to be our nature. How many times have you looked at a train wreck like Britney Spears and wondered, ‘what the hell problems could she have?’
There is probably good evolutionary reason for it. Fear, anxiety, suspicion, anger, worry. These are the tools of survival in a dog-eat-dog world. And even though we—at least those of us who won the lottery of birth and were born in North America in the latter part of the 20th century—don’t really live in that world any more, instinct is a tough thing to break.
Last summer, I visited friends who have a farm south of Regina. It was hot and they have a beautiful, deep dugout with clear, cool water. I dove in to cool off and have a swim.
The Bug wasn’t having any of it. Barely before I hit the water, she was in after me, trying to get hold and drag me back to shore. I tried to tell her no, tried to push her off, tried to swim away, but she was determined to save me, whether I needed saving or not.
She had never seen a drowning, or even swimming, person before. She had never been trained to do this thing, and yet there it was in her breeding.
Eventually I grabbed her collar and let her pull me back to shore. She was very proud of herself.
She also experiences happiness, sadness, frustration, loneliness, anger, fear. I can see it.
The thing that separates man from Bug, or at least this man from that bug, is the capacity to not only experience, but reflect on our emotions.
And we do. Like crazy. We talk about them, write about them, meditate about them, obsess about them. All of daytime TV, it seems, is dedicated to exploring them. We fabricate Gods and their associated elaborate religions to deal with them. We buy houses and boats and cars and TVs and clothes in the pursuit of the “positive” ones. We drink alcohol and take drugs and have sex to alleviate the “negative” ones.
In fact, pretty much everything we do is designed to alleviate suffering and/or promote happiness, either in this life or the next. And yet the things we think are going to make us happy, rarely do, except temporarily.
We make life hard, even when it’s not.
We know all these things. We’ve gone to church and read the books and listened to the music and taken the drugs and have the pithy motivational sayings on posters on our office walls and Hakuna Matata’d ourselves to death.
We know all things are temporary and all we can control is how we react to them. We know this intellectually, but living it is something else altogether.
I actually do empathize with Goga—right after thinking [expletive deleted] that [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted].
I am certain life is hard for her. Experience is all relative to what we know and all we ever really know is our own experience.
We look around and wonder why everybody we know is coping so well and we aren’t. But we don’t really know. In the end, we are all alone in our own experience of the world.
Commenting on his song “Burden of the Angel-Beast,” Bruce Cockburn said: “We are the weird animals we are, and we seem to be straddling this gap with one foot in the animal world entirely and the other foot in something we’ve never been able to entirely define for ourselves.”
“Could be the pusher/could be the priest/always ourselves we love the least/that’s the burden of the angel-beast.”
Life is hard. But also beautiful. The Bug reminds me of that every day.
