I found a journal entry from six years ago. It was written when I had a different diagnosis, bipolar then, schizoaffective now, though the brain doing the writing was the same brain. The diagnoses rearrange themselves around the brain. The brain stays the brain.
The entry is short:
We all have off days and wrestle with our foibles. Sometimes those foibles turn into our demons and bear their teeth and gnaw and bite; lick your wound and stand strong; tomorrow is another page. everything is temporary.
I read it and something landed. Not nostalgia, exactly. Not pity for the version of me that wrote it, though that was in there. Something more like recognition of a person reaching, in the dark, for a railing he could not yet name.
He thought he was writing about character. He was actually writing about Buddhism. He did not know either of these things.
The word in the entry that stops me is foibles.
He used it lightly. A wink at himself, the kind of wry, slightly archaic vocabulary you reach for when you do not want to take your own difficulties too seriously, when the alternative is to take them seriously enough to get pulled under. Foibles is a softening word. It is what you call your problems when you are trying to keep them at arm’s length long enough to write a sentence about them. I recognize the move. I make it too.
But the philosophical baggage of the word came along for the ride whether he wanted it to or not. A foible is a small character flaw, a quirk, a weakness of personality. The word presupposes a self with a fixed shape and a few rough edges, and it presupposes that managing those rough edges is a matter of effort, of standing strong, of licking the wound when the edge cuts you and getting back up. He didn’t necessarily believe any of that. He just had no other vocabulary handy at the kitchen table that morning.
What I now know is that the foibles in question were not, in any technical sense, foibles. They had a name. They were conditioned by medications still being titrated, sleep I was not getting, season-of-year, what I had eaten, whether the dogs had been walked. The “demons” that bore their teeth were not metaphysical visitors. They were brain chemistry expressing itself in the only language a person without a framework can hear it in: as a moral struggle. As something to wrestle with. As something a stronger version of yourself would have handled better.
This is the thing I keep coming back to about the before-person, in this entry and in everything else he wrote. He had no framework, or none that had settled into him yet. He was working with foibles when he should have been working with conditions. He was reaching for the right idea using the only words available.
He almost got there anyway. The last sentence of the entry got there. Everything is temporary. He just didn’t know he was including himself.
There is a writer named Stephen Batchelor I have been reading. He is a former Buddhist monk, ordained in both the Tibetan and Korean Zen traditions, who eventually walked away from the metaphysics, the rebirth, the karma as cosmic ledger, the whole apparatus of literal Buddhism, and tried to recover what he believes the Buddha was actually pointing at before the apparatus accumulated around it.
The word he uses, again and again, is contingency.
Most translators of the Pali render the relevant doctrine as dependent origination. The Sanskrit is pratītyasamutpāda. The phrase has the unmistakable smell of a doctrine, capitalized, scholastic, something to be parsed through commentaries. Batchelor uses contingency instead. Same insight, different register. The point is to get out of the doctrine and into the description.
The description is this: nothing exists on its own terms. Everything that arises arises in dependence on conditions, and would have been otherwise, or not at all, if those conditions had been different. The thought you are having right now is contingent on the language you happened to learn, the books you happened to read, the mood you happen to be in, the breakfast you happened to eat. The mood is contingent on sleep. The sleep is contingent on the medication. The medication is contingent on a diagnosis you happened to receive in a hospital in New Ulm in February of 2020. The diagnosis is contingent on a psychiatrist who happened to be on shift, on a system of categories that happened to be developed in a particular century by particular people, on a brain that happened to be doing the things it was doing because of genes inherited from people you never met.
Nothing in that chain has the property of being self-grounded. Nothing in it just is what it is on its own terms. Each link is held in place by the link before it, which is held in place by the link before it, and so on.
There is an old line, often attached to a story about a philosopher and an old woman who insists the world rests on the back of a giant turtle, and that turtle on another, and that one on another. It’s turtles all the way down. The line usually gets used to dismiss the woman as a crank. I think the woman is right.
Conditions all the way down. There is no terminating turtle, no ground floor, no foundation slab on which the conditioned things rest. The conditions are themselves conditioned. The conditions of those conditions are themselves conditioned. You cannot dig down through the layers and arrive at a self that is just itself, by itself, on its own terms. You arrive at more conditions. And more.
This is what Batchelor is pointing at when he uses the word. Contingency is not a property some things have and other things lack. It is the structure of the whole arrangement. It is the only structure on offer.
Apply this to the journal entry.
The foibles were conditioned. The conditions for the foibles, the brain chemistry, the medication still being titrated, the spring light, the marriage, the job, the ambient stress of a life I did not yet understand, were conditioned. The brain producing the conditions was conditioned by a genome conditioned by ancestors who left Finland and Ireland a few generations back, conditioned by an iron range in northern Minnesota that needed labor and offered enough of it to draw immigrants across an ocean, conditioned by ore deposits laid down long before any of us were anyone’s ancestor. Down and down. There is no point at which we hit the real Alex underneath all this, the one who would have had the foibles even if none of these conditions had obtained. There is no such Alex. There are only the conditions, arranging themselves into the temporary shape of a person, who then sat at a kitchen table at thirty-nine and wrote a journal entry about wrestling with foibles.
So when the before-person wrote everything is temporary, he was reaching, without knowing it, for the first of the three marks of existence in the tradition Batchelor was trained in. Anicca. Impermanence. The observation that nothing in the conditioned world stays.
He was reaching for it as a comfort. The comfort he wanted was the small one: this bad mood will pass. Tomorrow is another page. The hard night will end and there will be a morning and a coffee and the dogs will need to go out and the texture of the day will reassert itself and the demons will retreat back to wherever demons go between visits. This is true. The bad mood does pass. He was right about that.
The fuller version of what he was reaching for is harder. It is not only that the bad mood passes. It is that the self having the bad mood is itself passing, continuously, without rest. The before-person who wrote the entry has already passed. Not metaphorically. The conditions that produced him, the newly-medicated brain, the framework-less life, the particular configuration of marriage and job and Minnesota winter, those conditions no longer obtain. The person they produced is gone. He shares my name and my memories. He is not me. The person typing this sentence will also pass, conditioned out of existence by the next set of conditions, replaced by a slightly different configuration who will read this sentence later and recognize the handwriting without quite recognizing the hand.
Conditions all the way down also means: conditions all the way through. There is no resting place even within a single life. The “you” that wrestles with the foibles in the morning is not the “you” that wrestles with them in the evening. The continuity is a story the conditions tell themselves about themselves, because the conditions include a brain that is in the business of constructing continuous narratives. The story is useful. It is also, in the relevant sense, made up.
I want to be precise about something, because I think this is where the Buddhist material gets misused most often, and because the before-person, if he could read this, would object.
The fuller version of everything is temporary is not the comfort the before-person was seeking. He was seeking permission to keep going. He wanted someone, himself, in this case, six years ago, alone at a kitchen table, to confirm that what he was experiencing would end and that he, the continuous self at the center of the experience, would still be there afterward. Lick your wound and stand strong presupposes a him to lick and a him to stand. The contingency-all-the-way-down reading does not deliver this. It says: the wound is conditioned, the licking is conditioned, the standing is conditioned, the self that does the licking and the standing is also conditioned, and there is no extra layer underneath where the real him is succeeding or failing at managing the experience. There are only the conditions, arising and passing.
This sounds like nihilism. It is not, but the difference takes practice to feel.
What it actually is, what Batchelor argues it actually is, and what I have come to believe through a route that does not fully overlap with his, is permission. Permission to stop looking for the foundational self that is supposed to be doing the wrestling. Permission to stop grading him on his performance. The before-person was operating under enormous internal pressure to be a strong-enough version of himself to handle what he was being handed. He believed there was such a version, somewhere, and that his failure to access it was a moral failure. The contingency reading dissolves this. There is no strong-enough version waiting in the wings. There is only the conditioned arrangement currently obtaining, doing what it is doing, which is what it was always going to do given the conditions.
This is not exoneration. The conditions still produce consequences. The bad night is still bad. The demons still bite. But the extra layer of moral self-flagellation, the I should be handling this better, the better me would not be in this state, that layer is built on a fiction. There is no better self standing offstage. There is only this self, arising from these conditions, doing what these conditions produce.
So what was the entry actually doing, if not philosophy?
I think it was doing what most useful things people write to themselves do. Not stating a true claim. Performing a patterned breath. The instructions in the entry, lick your wound, stand strong, tomorrow is another page, are wrong about the metaphysics. There is no continuous self to stand. There is no book to turn pages in. But the rhythm of the instructions is right. They are a kind of motion, a sequence the conditioned arrangement can be coaxed into performing on the bad nights, and performing them produces conditions that are slightly more conducive to the next morning’s set of conditions being livable. That is what self-talk is, when it works. It is not a description. It is a maneuver.
I want to be careful here, because the contingency view, taken alone, can sound like it dissolves everything. It does not. The thread that held through the coma still held. The chair Melissa sat in for forty-five days was still her chair, still her vigil, still the most important thing in any room I have ever been in. The before-person who wrote the journal entry was still a real person, in the only sense of real that the conditioned world makes available. The Buddhist substrate does not erase any of this. It just describes what is underneath it. The stories I tell about my marriage and my survival and my selves are useful, and they do their work at their own level, and the level beneath them is also true, and both can be true at the same time without either having to win.
Everything is temporary was the closest the before-person got to seeing through his own story while still performing the maneuver. He let the truth in at the end of the entry, briefly, lowercase, almost as an afterthought, as if he didn’t want to make too much of it. everything is temporary. Then he closed the notebook.
Six years later I have most of what he was missing. I have the diagnosis. I have the framework. I have the seven pills every morning and the watching of mood in spring and the vocabulary for what was happening to him at the kitchen table that morning. I have read Batchelor and I can name the doctrine he was reaching for. I can describe the structure of contingency-all-the-way-down with what I think is reasonable accuracy.
And on the bad nights I still do exactly what he did.
I lick the wound. I stand back up. I turn the page. The descriptions underneath the maneuver are better now. I no longer pretend that there is a fixed self doing the licking, or that the wound is a wound rather than a conditioned arising of brain chemistry, or that the page is a page rather than a metaphor a brain produces because brains produce metaphors. The maneuver is the same. The story is wrong and the rhythm is right.
Everything is temporary. Including the one writing this sentence. Including the one who will read it later and recognize, with a small ache, the handwriting of someone who is already gone.
Tomorrow is another page. There is no book.
Quiet Mind, Loud Brain 
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