In one of my very favorite of her books, The Wisdom of No Escape, the American-born Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, recounts a story that I’ve been finding myself returning to lately. The story is drawn from Zen traditions, and while there are plenty of variations, it goes something like this:
A woman – and I love that she makes it a woman when so few parables do – finds herself being chased by a pack of ferocious tigers. She’s terrified, of course, and adrenaline is coursing through her body as she runs for her life. The tigers are just a few dozen yards behind her when she reaches the edge of a cliff.
The woman sees a vine extending down over the cliff and, out of other options, begins climbing down the vine, gripping it for dear life. Gasping for breath, she looks beneath her to the bottom of the cliff and, to her horror, she sees – more tigers. They stare up at her with hungry eyes. Her mind is racing as she tries to assess her next move. When she looks back up to the tigers who have now reached the top of the cliff, she notices a mouse gnawing on the vine to which she’s clinging.
The reality of it all has barely sunk in when the woman looks directly in front of her on the cliff’s wall and sees a small clump of grass, out of which is growing the most beautiful little bunch of strawberries. They glisten red in the afternoon sun and are perfectly ripe, just seeming to wait there for her for her arrival. She looks up at the tigers above. She looks down at the tigers below. She looks at the busy mouse gnawing away.
And then she takes one hand from the vine, picks the most beautiful of all of the strawberries, and puts it on her tongue. The sweetness fills her mouth, and she smiles.
–
We spend a lot of our lives hanging on these vines. We look behind us and feel grief at the joy to which we can’t return. We look ahead and feel anxiety about the hardships and unknowns that lay before us. We cling to what we hope will keep us safe – our work, our institutions, our vices – but then we watch as those fray, as all things are wont to do in this impermanent world.
Maybe this sounds awfully depressing, but I don’t know that it has to be. This tender paradox is, I believe, the essence of our human condition: We are gifted this beautiful opportunity of life with the absolute certainty that it will be full of struggle and loss. That it will, at some point, end. Tigers above, tigers below.
Many of us spend much of our early life still fueled by the adrenaline of the chase. Sure, we know on some level that pain and loss will eventually catch up to us, but maybe we can outrun it for as long as we can. We want to believe that if we hustle, we grind, we steel ourselves, we can evade life’s eventual sharp edges.
But at some point we all reach the cliff – brought to our edge by circumstance or time – and we begin to reckon with the inevitability of hardship. We hold on to what we can – we find our lifelines. But even those will can only hold for so long, and that’s the precise moment when we have a choice to make.
We can cling tighter to the vine. We can exhaust our lungs crying for help. We can fret and wail and rage at our reality.
Or, we can eat the strawberry.
–
For much of my life, I wanted to wait to eat my strawberries until they came with some kind of guarantee. It seemed indulgent or reckless to taste them when I had no certainty that there would be more. I walked right by them, promising to return, or would try to store them up for later, when I would be feeling safer and could really enjoy them.
But, as we all know, strawberries don’t keep.
–
I’ve been looking around for strawberries lately – and I promise I’ll stop overworking this metaphor soon, though maybe not soon enough – and I’ll be damned if they don’t in fact grow everywhere.
There are all of these delicious moments that are inviting me to be present with them, to reach out and fully digest them. The sweet smell of my daughter’s hair after her bath. The complement offered by a near-stranger. The chance to pick up my novel instead of my laptop. The way the sun filters through the tree in my backyard. If I’m craning my neck too far back or too far forward, I miss the ones hanging right in front of me, though.
And what strikes me is how much courage it still takes to eat them. To savor them without requiring them to keep. To embrace pleasure before sadness or angst or fear has resolved.
But I think, on some level, that is precisely what gives them their sweetness. It comes from choosing to not postpone aliveness until conditions improve. That’s not naive optimism or reckless abandon; it’s actually the most honest reckoning with reality.
There are some seasons when the tigers are a bit more ferocious or are a little closer to reaching us. But I’m convinced there are always strawberries to be found.
Eat the strawberry.
–
Questions for Reflection:
- What emotions do you find keep you from noticing and being present with the sweet things in your life?
- What beliefs might you carry (and need to release) about what it means to enjoy things or experience pleasure when things aren’t going well?
- What are some strawberries you could let yourself eat today?
