Thank You, I Have No Complaints

A mantra to level the playing field of experience.

Lights up on our scene.

Two young lovers are seated at a small dinette set in the darkness of his childhood home. He doesn’t live here anymore but he still has a key.

The apartment, an eighth-floor co-op in the Bronx, is empty now, save for the kitchen table, beds, a tiny TV, and the illicit feeling between them that nothing else in the world matters when they are here, alone together.

“Happy birthday, Babypie,” his whole heart is beaming through his face as he lights the last of twenty candles on the cake. She is entering into her second decade with gaze resting on the picture of pure adoration, a head of black curls, and the most beautiful sapphire eyes looking back at her, loving her. Whatever wish for the future she makes in this flickering light will pale in comparison to what is already alive in this moment.

But she doesn’t know that. Yet.

Their conversations are lit with flares of uproarious laughter. He does this thing when he thinks something is funny—a kind of tip-of-the-tongue half lip-lick before his mouth spreads into a full howl, punctuated by a mischievous glare. There’s usually some sort of clap involved; the requisite percussive element, of course. They watch “Showtime at the Apollo” in bed. It’s the only thing on without cable but seems to deliver the ironic punchline to their meeting at music school and deciding to drop out two years later in the same semester because “who needs a music degree? I’ll just walk in and get a record deal.”

More laughter. More loving.

Life begins as the accumulation of experience and somewhere along the line becomes a highlight reel of moments. Driving the Throgs Neck bridge at night. Watching New York City sparkle in the distance as Marc Anthony growls in Spanish on the radio. Perusing the shelves of the neighborhood bodega for olive oil. The watery echo tone of his obnoxiously neon Ibanez guitar. The infant crying upstairs. The fever that breaks on his skin when he needs her. Her body pressed against the wall of glass windows in that apartment as the cars rush below on I-95. The mami’s and the papi’s. It’s all there. The imprint of feeling really alive. And they didn’t care about anything. He loved her. She loved him. There was no lie between them. It is impossible to reconcile that kind of emotional wealth with the poverty of not knowing how to appreciate it in real time, amidst the tangle of so many other things. And yet the truth is, we never do.

The maddening condition of humanness is that the pinnacle moments of our happiness are rarely recognized as such when we’re in them. The summits of personal contentment, where the confluence of influences are just so, create a vibe that when recalled, leaves a ping of longing in the heart. That was it. And intellectually you can remind yourself how imperfect it was for any number of reasons, but there it is in your memory, gleaming with the unmistakeable condensation of ephemeral beauty. He doesn’t live here anymore but he still has a key.

We are blind to the gift of circumstance while we’re in it. Each moment seems just like every surrounding moment—mundane somehow—and the opportunity, the perfect health, the youth, the relationships, are all so sticky with humanness and its issues. Inside a succession of apparently linear moments, there always exists the possibility of and the hope for a better future moment. It is only once we are outside of that thought, that veil of perception—hope—that we are granted the perspective that allows us to look back and reclassify the mundane as magical. 

“Your own life, while it’s happening to you, never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.”

Andy Warhol

The truth is, it may never be better than this. The story of your present existence—this body/mind experience in this “reality” on this “planet” in this “moment in time”—may well find its zenith right now, at the junction of circumstances we so casually call today. On the other hand, you may attain a somehow better version of yourself tomorrow. Who can know? Will the world of constant churning even be accommodating of your future self? Maybe so, maybe not.

Everything changes but the one constant: this is it. There is no other this to be attained. Such a realization alone should prompt you to seize the preciousness of life unfolding with so much presence that it makes the future long for a past with you. This is it. Be here. Now. And yet this miraculous happening inevitably devolving once again into little more than a quest to stave off abject boredom is life’s biggest joke. What kind of prankster God designs existence so that awareness can only appreciate an attribute in its absence? Want to relish good health? Get sick. Want to appreciate your beauty? Age out of it. Want to realize the gift of real love? Lose it. You get the idea. We could seethe ad nauseam about the sadist upstairs but why personify the Absolute? This is the experience of duality. This is what it means for consciousness to become an object to itself and live in a world of other “objects”, all fading in and out, coming and going, appearing and disappearing. This is the gag—the absence defines the presence.

A man once asked a zen teacher to cure his unhappiness. Her prescription was for one year, no matter what happened, to bow and say, “Thank you, I have no complaints whatsoever.”

In a retrospective analysis, we can dissect the events of our lives and intellectualize fate. We can try to analyze how the now is crystallizing into the past and try to outwit the grand master. What hubris! Stop knowing things to death! The innate wisdom of existence is that it teaches through any means and finds us wherever we are because we are not separate from it. The Oneness experience isn’t some kind of special this. It’s this. We’re it. This is it.

We compartmentalize experience into levels of desirability based upon how those experiences are filtered through our nervous system, which leads us on an endless pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. We try to make things other than how they are and this is slavery. The mantra Thank you, I have no complaints whatsoever levels the hierarchies of experience into the one play of consciousness of which you are the total functioning.

There’s only one experience and you’re having it.

This. Is. It.

THANK YOU, I HAVE NO COMPLAINTS.

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