Touching peace

I've always had a fantasy about becoming a monk. I'm not wedded to a particular kind of monk, I just figure a life of peace and solitude dedicated to pursuing a relationship with God or internalizing the Four Noble Truths might be the thing that fixes me.

This is an idle thought that I have not seriously pursued. I love my little treats and abandoning all material attachments sounds hard. I assume I will be stuck in the cycle of samsara for some time yet.

All the different schools of thought on this basically boil down to the bell curve meme: blissful ignorance and true knowledge of the self and the sublime look about the same. Unfortunately most of us are stuck somewhere in that endless middle.

I think a lot about Kierkegaard's writing on despair: the man who knows that he despairs, and knows his own relation to the eternal, but is unable or unwilling to take the step from despair into love and acceptance. Is that better than ignorance?

I am intellectually able to accept the meaninglessness of the universe, of my own insignificance in the face of the eternal, that peace only comes from the act of accepting. But it seems like without entirely dedicating my life to the practice of turning that intellectual acceptance into a belief I will be stuck cycling in and out of despair forever. I'm in good company there - I assume if Kierkegaard had ever managed to become a knight of faith he would have stopped writing so many books that were just arguments with himself - but I'd like to know what faith and peace look like.

I finally did a retreat at a Buddhist monastery upstate last year, just as the weather was turning from winter to spring. I camped out on the grounds, ate vegan food with the monks, and met the wide variety of people you'd expect to show up at a cheap meditation retreat two hours from New York in early April: yoga moms, Jersey hippies, Thich Nhat Hanh devotees, and a couple young Yalies who were very concerned with meditating the "right" way and kept asking everyone how they had developed their practice. A whole crew came up from the "sangha" in Manhattan, all of whom seemed nice but deeply uncool. As someone whose meditation practice has been almost entirely solitary, it was an interesting experience. I went up with friends but spent most of my spare time walking around the grounds, watching the newly-bloomed cherry blossoms blow across the surface of the poorly-disguised artificial pond.

The monks, for the most part, were the types of blissed-out Buddhists you'd expect, except for the one in charge of facilities management - he seemed deeply irritated a lot of the time, but I would be too if I had to fund my life of pursuing peace by housing twenty annoying New Yorkers at a time.

I met two trainee monks and asked them how they got into it. One had seemingly been planning for this his entire life, but the other said he had tried to buy a car and got so frustrated that he decided to abandon materialism entirely. I'm still a bit envious of that decision.

On the last day after our morning meditation I asked one of the friendlier monks what I should do with my remaining time there and he told me to touch peace. There was no specific task that would get me there, he said, I just had to find whatever made me feel peaceful in that moment. So I walked around the grounds and breathed in the cold spring air.

I don't touch peace as often as I'd like, but I try to remember that it I’m able to. Maybe one of these days I'll try to buy a car and finally get so fed up I join a monastery. In the meantime all I can do is find little moments where touching peace feels possible. Sometimes that might even be enough.