Last time I was in Hawai’i I got a chance to see my first drag show. It was a fundraiser for Spill the Tea Cafe and my friend Marcel (or Rosa F’Wellness) was performing and I wanted to support the cause. Now, I’m not really a “go see a show” kind of a fellow at all let alone a drag show so it was a very interesting learning experience for me.
This wasn’t the first time I had a completely new cultural experience this year, I first experienced it in India. A completely new continent with thousands years of history and culture — I took it all in like a newborn baby learning how to live in the world.
Some things in India are so nonsensical in the rest of the world. For example, in rural India everything is practically wide open fields and there isn’t enough infrastructure to cover all of that large land mass with sanitation or irrigation. This naturally leads to people taking care of nature’s duty in the wild.
But you just go a little bit up north to Nepal and it is not normal to just pee anywhere; Korean people who were just a few days ago having a hard time peeing in the wild were suddenly finding themselves surprised to re-adjust to peeing in restrooms. It’s crazy how the human mind works.
The drag show featured a lot of dance, singing, and exposure. The performers were obviously doing all of that but in some segments the audience was also participating in the show. As I saw the people performing in various aptitudes (as in, some people were on stage focused on having fun while others had a choreograph they were doing), I remembered the talent shows school used to have in my student days.
Talent shows are one thing but sometimes the school has events where the entire class has to perform a choreography. Some kids are naturally shy and you can really tell they’re dying inside as they perform on stage. Performing is one person’s nightmare.
In Korea K-Pop is a big cultural influence (obviously?!), so I grew up watching a lot of people preparing for auditions. I wasn’t one of them per se, but you know what? I do recall submitting a voice audition over the phone when I was in elementary school. Good times. Anyhow, I enjoyed performing and all the attention it gave me so I know that performing can be one person’s dream.
When we break it down like this, it’s clear to see that the same activity, same life circumstance can be one man’s dream AND it can also be one person’s nightmare. Nothing about performing is strictly dreamy or nightmarish; it’s just contextual to a person’s life and desires.
But when we instinctively react to things without thinking about it, we have a tendency to default to thinking that things are inherently good or bad. What I mean by instinctively react is something like eating while using your phone. When you’re intentionally eating you’re picking out the best bite with the fork, guiding it to your mouth gently and chewing it while savoring the food. When you’re eating while using your phone, you’re kind of letting eating go on auto pilot.
Unconsciously classifying life situations as nightmares has two negative effects for your life. One, it has potential to damage other people. Suppose you just got a rescue dog from a shelter and the doggo is an adorable goofball. You excitedly tell your friend and your friend responds with, “ew lol”. Even though they may apologize later, the damage is already done.
I ultimately advocate for a sense of self that is absolutely unaffected by other people, but reality is: we’re influenced by what other people tell us, and we influence others by the things we say to them.
The other negative effect is, you damage yourself. If you have no suffering at all, isn’t that basically heaven? Do you need to die in order to get to a state where you have no suffering? If you’re suffering in life for all the reasons, isn’t that basically hell? Do you need to die in order to get to a state where you’re suffering?
When you participate in a worldview where a nightmarish situation exists, you’re basically living in a world where hell exists. You might not be there right now, but the possibility of it coming to you is always present as long as that hell exists. “Being poor is like hell for me, so I work hard to make money”. But what happens when life throw you a curve ball and you lose access to money for a while?
“Convicted felons deserve to rot in prison”. But what happens when you get into an accidental situation and you can’t afford a better lawyer than the other party, and you get incarcerated for a situation you never expected to happen? These things happen in real life and all the work you supported to make prisons more miserable now will impact you.
It’s important to review our perspectives, particularly around what we find to be negative. It’s important to recognize that even though we might find a situation to be nightmarish, there are people living in that situation as a dream come true.
The Buddhist concept of heaven is Pure Land. Pure Land doesn’t need to be a destination you go to after you die, although there’s no problem in that belief. I am simply suggesting that, having Pure Land in this lifetime is not only possible but a desirable ideal to strive for.