Five Suckers Tomorrow

I enjoy reading articles by psychologist types who devise all these clever puzzles that help reveal how tricky our own minds can be all on their own.  My attempts at meditation show me just how rambunctious my brain is, how unwilling to cede any control whatsoever.  I was listening to a podcast by a prominent researcher who was studying hidden biases in our thinking and how innate they can be.  He spoke with a number of children under the age of ten about nothing in particular before asking them this: I'll give you one sucker now or five suckers tomorrow.  Most of the kids went for immediate gratification even though the future reward was going to be larger.  Gimme gimme gimme.

We tell new people that if they don't drink and try haltingly to practice spiritual principles they'll end up in a place where the world makes sense, where fear and anxiety aren't driving their every thought, where they will love and be loved . . . or they can say - fuck it - and drink to make the uncomfortable feelings go away immediately.  How often we take the quick fix, eschewing the long-term solution.  Over and over for most of us.

Here's the Cherokee wisdom: "Our choices have brought us to this place, right here, today.  Other people affected us to some degree, but never so much as what we choose to do and how we choose to react.  The hardest part is to stop thinking dilemma and start thinking solutions.  There is no room in problem solving for self-pity, not even revenge.  Past events may have been wrong, but now we have to see it as change, not always our doing, but we have to handle it anyway."

Quit whining, in other words.  Stop drinking.  You're drinking all by yourself and no one is making you do it.

And now the Buddhists: "Meditators are generally found to be pretty jovial people.  They possess a real sense of humor.  They can laugh at their own human failures.  They can chuckle at personal disasters."

How many of us are drawn to Alcoholics Anonymous by the laughter and good-will that we find in church basements?  How many church basements have I sat in!  Church basements are not fancy places.