I really like Buddhism, in a lot of ways. But I’ve followed that whole non-attachment, think-positive shit to its natural conclusion. In many ways it feels to me now like a complete rejection of life, for to live is to be attached. If you’re not at least attached to clean air, clean water, and good food then you probably don’t have a pulse. The doctrine of non-attachment has lessons to teach western culture with its focus on the static eternal, but the rejection of all attachments, of all love for places and people strikes me as absurd.
I had my moments of flirtation with the buddhist viewpoint. I certainly grew as a person studying it. But I knew something was terribly wrong when I returned from Japan to find the woods I grew up in cut through and did not, could not, react emotionally. The sound of the god-awful stump grinder coming through every morning thereafter to finish the destruction and erase any memory of the trees that stood broke the hardpan over my heart and planted the seeds of rage.
It’s not a reaction. It’s living. I live, and so I feel and feel deeply, even if it is sorrow and anger. Not a damn thing wrong with that!