You can't will yourself into okayness

notes to self

Let me describe two states which I’ll loosely refer to as “okayness” and “non-okayness”.

Okayness is when you feel fundamentally at ease with reality and with yourself. You feel like you are enough: there is nothing fundamentally deficient about you. You move through life with grace and fluidity. When bad things happen, negative emotions arise, and you just feel them, and then they pass, and none of that detracts from the fundamental beauty of your experience. Life feels inherently meaningful, you’re perfectly content with how things are, while also naturally gliding towards the things you want.

Non-okayness is the opposite. I’ve described it elsewhere as being “mildly disgruntled all the time.” You’re frustrated with life and with yourself. You feel like there is something wrong with you, although it’s a different problem in each moment: you’re too soft, you’re too rough, you’re too social, you’re too alone. You constantly feel like you’re in the wrong place and you “should have” done something else to avoid this situation. You’re often questioning what the point of all this is. You’ll still have moments of feeling excited and joyful, and you still have desires. You pursue those desires ardently in the hope that they’ll alleviate this emptiness inside you, and when they are satisfied, it definitely feels nice for a while, but soon you revert back to feeling frustrated and sad, and it’s almost as if you were never happy in the first place.

Here’s the thing I’ve had difficulty accepting: you can’t simply will yourself from the non-okayness state to the okayness state.

---

The first meditation retreat I went to gave me a taste of what enduring okayness feels like. Up until that point, I had only ever experienced it in brief glimpses: perhaps a few days in a row at most. After my retreat, though, I felt like I was in that state for several months.

I distinctly remember one of my first days back in New York after my retreat. I was on PTO so I had the day to myself, and I didn’t have much of an agenda. Usually this is enough to put me on edge: I like maximizing productive use of my time, so I make detailed schedules and todo lists. If I spend an entire day off doing “nothing”, I’ll feel really bad and frustrated with myself at the end of it.

This day, post-retreat, was not like any day I had experienced before. It felt like literally anything could happen and things would be perfectly fine. I do some work? Great. I don’t do any work? Great. I felt like I could just sit there and stare at the brick walls of my apartment all day. I felt such unbridled affection for my roommates and friends. I started reading Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, and felt moved by every paragraph. I could read for a whole hour without the slightest urge to use my phone. And even when bad things happened—one night I was hurt by something my friend did, another night someone at a bar yelled at me—I would feel upset, and then I’d move on, and it wouldn’t spiral into an endless internal echo of “I should’ve done this, I should be that, I should do that.”

This okayness lasted for a few months, but it slowly went away. One of the things about okayness is that it entails a lot of presence, and the more your sense of presence deteriorates, the less aware you are of the fact that it’s deteriorating. In other words, I don’t have much recollection of “losing it slowly” over time, I just remember feeling that way for a long time and then at some point not feeling that way at all. (Of course, memory is a finicky thing, so consider all this with a grain of salt.)

My point is: once I went back to my non-okay self, I wanted nothing more than to go back to the feeling of okayness. And I kept trying to figure out why that feeling went away, and how I could get it back. I blamed a bajillion different things. I thought it was my phone, so I’d spend extended periods of time on airplane mode. I thought it was because I wasn’t meditating enough, so I’d try to sit for 60-80 minutes per day. I thought it was New York, so I spent a few months in Toronto. I thought I just needed another retreat, so I went to another retreat. None of it worked: they would all give me some degree of okayness, but it never felt stable in the way that those months after my first retreat did.

I failed to recognize that entering stable okayness is a non-voluntary inner movement. There are many outer, voluntary moves you can do to make it more likely that the inner, non-voluntary move occurs, but none of them will reliably trigger the inner move. Being in a state of non-okayness is like having an internal knot in your mind, and the harder you try to untie the knot—the more you clench and tug on it—the tighter the knot becomes. Meditating for ten minutes might untie the knot, but you might also just meditate for ten minutes and still feel knotted. The longer you meditate, the more likely it is that the knot will untie, but again, you can’t untie the knot yourself, not directly. You could sit for an entire hour and still not get to where you’re trying to go.

Certain things nudge you towards okayness, while certain things nudge you away from it. The things that tend to nudge me towards okayness are: retreats, quiet time to myself, long walks, reading, and looking at beautiful things. The things that nudge me away from okayness are: consuming a lot of social media, socializing a ton, having a lot of deadlines. This doesn’t mean that those things are strictly bad and to be avoided at all costs. It’s just about working through your own relationship to these things — trying to figure out what it is about these things that uproots yourself sense of okayness, and address that.

One of the trickiest aspects of the inner knot is this: each time it gets tied again, it’s in an ever-so-slightly different shape, requiring a different move to untie it. You might have one meditation technique that reliably gets you there for a while, and then at some point it stops working, and now you need something else. You need a differently-shaped reminder, a differently-shaped piece of the truth, to get you back there each time. The shift that has been working for me most recently is to recognize that okayness just isn’t something I can reliably produce. And repeatedly asking myself, what is the truth of this moment, rather than trying to figure out how I can get to some other state, or some past memory or object of blame, that has nothing to do with what is going on right now.

All these things are little nudges to help make it more likely that you get to okayness. It’s anyone’s guess whether you’ll actually get there, and if you do, how long you’ll stay.