"Imperishable Bliss": On Longing for Perfection & Life's Ungovernability

Several years ago, in a dimly-lit meditation hall far up in the North Carolina mountains, I heard an unusual version of the First Noble Truth – a core tenant of Buddhism – that felt like a sigh of relief.

Commonly translated as “Life is suffering,” the meditation teacher that day shared that a truer translation might be “Life is ungovernable.” Ungovernable: meaning, there is never going to be a point at which everything comes permanently together, stays perfectly still in just the right form, forever settles down in tune with our longing.

I remember how freeing this felt because I, like every other human on earth, find myself so often fighting against the reality that I cannot completely tie my life up in some neat, permanent bow. But it’s true: life can never be permanently settled, controlled, ordered. What is so strange is that this kind of permanent perfection seems to be a universal longing, and yet it is inherently unfulfillable.

One of the most compelling imaginal exercises in unfulfillable longing that I’ve ever encountered comes from the masterful Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison. In it, Harrison – a Stanford literature professor – sketches out an image of one of Western civilization’s great “origin stories”: the fall of Adam and Eve out of the paradisiacal garden, a place in which everything was, from the very beginning, perfectly settled, fulfilled, and immutably good. In a stunning chapter too layered to reproduce in full here, Harrison sketches out the strange way in which humans have always seemed to long for something that is, by definition, completely unattainable. In what might be my favorite line in the whole book, Harrison says, “She [Eve] had a paradisiac origin, and through her we have inherited a native nostalgia for some imperishable bliss.”

Everyone to whom I have recently read that gorgeous line has sighed or laughed with recognition. We all get it. Permanent perfection, settledness, and a feeling of never-ending rightness is something all of us crave. And yet, as Harrison points out, there was a strange dissatisfaction for Adam and Eve in their perfected state, a sort of knowing that this perfected unchangingness was somehow also absent of human care and longing, of beauty, poignancy, compassion, and depth – the things which really give life its meaning, things which are granted by the very mutability against which we so often struggle.

In his book You Are Here, the beloved Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says, “I would not want to live in a place where there is no suffering, because in such a place I would not be able to cultivate understanding and compassion, which are the basis of my happiness.” I laughed aloud when I read this line. It was a feeling of how absolutely true this was, that, as he says, “Happiness is a function of compassion” – something I had never really considered in this way before.

When I forget this truth – that the difficulty of engaging with life is actually the ground of our deepest satisfaction – I spend a whole lot of time and energy struggling against what is, willing life to do what I want it to. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work. Never has, never will. There might be moments of feeling as if I’ve cracked the code, as if life is finally doing what I want it to in every sector. But those moments are tremendously fleeting, and are often laced through with a subtle anxiety about when this perfection might end.

The more difficult, but far more true, path seems to be an honest engagement with both my longing for perfection and the reality of its inherent unfulfillability. Whatever its source, it is true that we have this “native nostalgia for imperishable bliss” which manifests in a thousand versions of longing for perfection, for life to stay the same when it’s pleasurable and to change as quickly as possible when it’s not. But the more I live, and the more I take in wisdom from those who have made the cultivation of presence their life’s practice, the more I sense that not only would imperishable bliss fail to fulfill us as we think it would, we would also – as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests – lose the very source of our deepest kind of happiness.

In that dark meditation hall in North Carolina, I felt as if I had gained a way to describe both my longing for life to line up, once and for all, and a knowing clearer than I’d ever felt that life is simply never going to do that. Accepting this, over and over again, is a daily practice, and it continually reveals itself as the first step toward peace. The second might be this: knowing that this very ungovernability against which we fight is actually the ground from which our deepest fulfillment grows.