“Christopher Guest’s role in The Princess Bride was the reason I was excited to see the movie when it was first released in the fall of 1987. I was nine years old. All I knew was that this man I had known all my life played a bad guy (a hilarious idea in itself) and that the movie was a kind of fairy tale, but not just any fairy tale. Even upon first viewing it, I knew the film was a parody. It felt like a sarcastic Xerox of the fairy-tale genre, as if a smart older kid were making fun of some cheesy story I’d already seen a thousand times.
I remember enjoying the movie that first time; it displaced my troubled mind into humor and fantasy during a particularly rough stretch of childhood, a yearlong span that included my parents’ difficult divorce, my grandparents’ double suicide, and, like a candle torched at both ends, the premature death of my parents’ Buddhist teacher, the man who exerted a central gravitational pull in the galaxy of their lives (and later mine), the brilliant and enigmatic Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
On top of all that trauma, there was the day-to-day chaos of fourth grade. My best friend had skipped forward a grade without me after third grade, leaving me to fend for myself. Fending for myself was a difficult task, because I had two surgeries that year to help with a mild case of cerebral palsy on my right side. Surgery left me outcast, in a cast, for a significant portion of the school year. My best friend skipping ahead and my gimp status together made me, objectively speaking, the second least popular kid in my class.
Sadly, this popularity ranking happened at a hippy New York City school founded in the 1960s on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’ s vision of an inclusive multicultural society. This wonderful school preached nothing but diversity and acceptance daily— a sign that even the best utopias hold popularity contests. Fortunately for me, I still had one friend at school that year. Unfortunately for both of us, his social spasms, angry demeanor, and prepubescent unibrow made him, also objectively speaking, the number one least popular kid in our class.
Our friendship was mostly circumstantial and far from ideal. But still, he was my friend, my only real friend that year— that is, until, like the worst Buddhist kid in the world, I told him we couldn’t hang out anymore, that he was dragging me down. His gruff demeanor crumbled as he started to cry. It was an awful move on my part, a classic case of the weak abandoning the weaker. Thirty years later, my choice still haunts me occasionally during sessions of compassion meditation…
I have worked with thousands of people on the practice of meditation, and it turns out, after all, that nobody comes to meditation looking to find their breath. Nobody is looking for a mantra. Nobody is looking for a teacher, or an altar, or a shrine, or even a community to practice with— although all these things often prove helpful to what we are seeking. What folks always come looking for is a way to be more present, less stressed, and more effective in life. Occasionally a student wants to leave her whole life behind and immerse herself in a long, solitary retreat. But what is a retreat, anyway? A retreat just means you crave some time and space away from your claustrophobic human relationships.
So, it really is this simple: we get on the spiritual path because either we want tools for our relationships or we want to escape those relationships for a while. We want to escape relationships only because we think we lack the tools to deal with other people sanely. Regardless, relationships, and our struggles with them, are the crux of any spiritual path. In one word, life is about interdependence.
Life is a web of relationships, a cohort of people rubbing up against, and rubbing off on, one another. We each fumble through life for a brief series of moments, anchored only by our connection with our own minds, and our connection with other beings. Sometimes the web of human relationships around us feels grounding and supportive. Sometimes it feels like a sticky trap, a spiderweb.”
~ Ethan Nichtern, The Dharma of The Princess Bride: What the Coolest Fairy Tale of Our Time Can Teach Us About Buddhism and Relationships
Photos ~ Ethan Nichtern with Duncan Trussell
~ packing tape web art installation at Viennese stock exchange.
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