Who am I anyway, Am I my resume?

It's times like these, identity crisis times, when I believe one should take refuge in musical theatre. Nothing says unemployed in show business like a number from A Chorus Line.

Nothing says you're not the first one to have a broken heart, and you're probably a better person for it, like The Fantasticks -- "Deep in December, it's nice to remember:Without a hurt, the heart is hollow...."

A line on the efficacy of revenge in response to betrayal? Okay so you have Macbeth...out damn spot...blah, blah, blah. But even better, from Sweeney Todd --"The history of the world, my pet, is learn forgiveness and try to forget."

You know what I think it is? I think it's the rhyming. Nothing helps life seem to make more sense than a good rhyme. A rhyme is like a nice little bow made out of language. Which actually works for us because we can't look at our life directly, we have to talk about it with language. If we can fit our life into an understandable storyline, we feel better. If it fits into a description we can understand, we feel okay.

I think for writers, it might even be possible to say that, we wouldn't even care...or maybe...bad things suck a lot less...if we can fit those certain events into a well-written narrative. And if that narrative is set to music and rhymes, well, really, how bad could it be? Sure you've been wrongly accused and spent 15 years transported to Australia, and now you've just murdered a bunch of people, including, accidentally, your wife...but Stephen Sondheim is making pithy rhymes about you, so it's all coming together in a nice little bow!

But maybe this is true for all people -- if we knew the hard times and suffering would all be worth it in the end, would lead us down the road we were supposed to go down -- then we would probably accept it happily. After all, every biopic needs scenes of struggle, otherwise the inevitable triumph would seem flat and less...triumphant. No one wants to see a movie where the protagonist triumphs over easily surmountable odds. In real life, however, that's exactly what we want.

But that's exactly what we don't get. We don't get to flip to the back of the book, skip to the end of the movie. So what do we do? Maybe we start by not expecting to go in any particular direction, for things to go in a particular way.

My first Buddhist teacher always responds to whatever news I give her about myself, with the following phrase: "Oh, good!" This is especially true when things go wrong. Or "wrong".

We train, as Buddhists, so that whatever comes we try to think, "Oh, good!" Oh, good...I'm learning patience. Oh, good...I'm learning how expectations can set you up for disappointment. Oh, good...this makes me want to attain enlightenment as soon as possible. It definitely helps. But it takes practice and a certain amount of mental stamina. Otherwise you get my to-date, favorite subject line generated by Yahoo! Mail's random subject generator (see note below), "Oh, no! Not another learning experience!"

But if we think about it, we have a choice, another learning experience, or another disappointment. Oh, good! or Oh, crap! And what we hopefully start to learn, is that the situation responds to our choice, it responds to us...and not vice versa. It's actually the happily accepting that takes us down the road we're supposed to go on.

And that is the ultimate reason for hope. Oh, good.

Note: If you have the beta version of Yahoo! Mail, click on the "Subject" button, and Yahoo! will generate a subject line for you. It's endlessly entertaining. Today's favorite: Hold me closer, Tony Danza.