We’re all broken

We’re all broken in some way. We can’t let ourselves be fooled by Facebook or TV or the glossies. Literally no-one is perfect. Everyone of us is human (or dog, or whatever), with all the flaws that entails. Socially-maintained habit energy tells us that we can, and really, should be, perfect. So we strive and feel terrible when we fall short again, and again, and again.

We’re all broken. If we don’t take care of ourselves and each other, nobody will.

And yet we keep telling the world we are fine, we are doing great, we are perfect. Or if not quite that, then at least that we are on the way. That we’re getting shit done. That we’ve hacked it and are crushing it.

I call bullshit.

We’re all more or less broken. More or less of the time. That’s ok. What’s not ok is to make ourselves and each other suffer by pretending we’re not, by pressuring each other not to be.

Karmapa said, “failure is inevitable. Sooner or later everyone fails. So, may you fail well.”

We’re all broken, but we’re already perfect just as we are. Not necessarily in the sense that we just cheat and redefine ‘perfect’ as whatever brokenness we find in ourselves, although that’s possibly a good start.

No, we’re already perfect because our true nature already is Buddha, already is enlightened. We’re just too distracted to notice. But thanks to impermanence and emptiness we can re-notice, recognize, this at any given moment if we stop fussing about how broken we are and running around like headless chickens trying to function according to some arbitrary notion.

But make no mistake, as long as we *are* distracted by the habit of the eight worldly dharmas, we’re just keeping the hamster wheel spinning, layering more notions and distractions and delusions on top of what is already keeping us from recognizing the truth.

We’re all broken, and that’s a good thing: it can help us give up that distraction, renounce the notions of ‘functioning’ and ‘perfect,’ and remember what’s really important.

In that sense I wish all of us (human, dog, whatever) a year of recognizing our own broken self for what really is, and all the joy, compassion, and wisdom that comes with it.