A Thousand Bricks, One Tremor

For mortal people, moving through life unaffected and unperturbed by little things is impossible. You can dedicate years into building a wall around you, made of thousands of individual bricks, in the hope that, maybe once and for all, you’ll be fortified against negative emotions; strong enough to absorb whatever life throws your way. It is a lifetime project, which people strive to accomplish in various ways. But, sadly, it will be perpetually incomplete. Holes will always exist. The bricks will tumble. You’ll have to keep building.

That isn’t to suggest that improving your ability to deal with adversity and challenge, or becoming better at internally processing, rather than externally projecting, your discomfort, is not worth your while—it absolutely is. Yet, it is an imperfect process. Acknowledging that imperfection can be difficult.

This morning, I had a tremendous sleep, woke up, and decided to go to the beach. I felt great. But as I was getting out of bed, I felt a pang of anger. My mind had drifted someplace and anger arose. There is nothing wrong with that, inherently. The error comes through expression. Manifesting that anger through action is where the damage lies. It often doesn’t, but on this occasion, it permeated the bricks. Spite and frustration seeped into my tone. From whatever tiny tremor initiated those feelings in the first place, the bricks came tumbling down.

We can never dodge even those emotions we’re most unwilling to feel, whether that be anger, sadness, fear—the possibilities are endless. They will arrive trivially, illogically, and randomly. These tremors can simply pass underneath you. You feel them arrive, but then they leave again shortly after. But sometimes, an innocuous tremor cascades into an earthquake. Your walls might have a strong foundation, but they come crashing down anyway.

As you stand there amongst the ruins, in the aftermath of whatever transpired, it can be easy to try and lay blame to the destruction; to make it make sense. You might reason that someone, or something, else plotted this earthquake, specifically to hit you, here and now. But they didn’t.

The tremors are inevitable, but the earthquakes come from within your own head. There will be more earthquakes in future, no matter how immune you think you are. Even if the bricks toppled over this time, you should keep building. Post-earthquake, there will be damage. Observe it all, the ruins around you. Learn from it. Then, instead of burning everything to the ground in retribution, seeking to eliminate some elusive, imaginary perpetrator that caused all this damage, start repairing the building.

Tremors will always be there, but continue laying bricks; building your capacity for mindfulness. You’ll always make mistakes, lash out, take regrettable action, and need to grapple with the consequences. Viewing your emotions objectively, and with balance, can be agonisingly difficult. But that doesn’t need to stop you from trying.