This particular Shakespearean tragedy’s protagonist has been called the first real existential (anti)hero in literature, with his anguished vacillations and the crushing burden of responsibility he feels, trapped within his profoundly lonely dilemma, lacking divine guidance or any other means of moral support. A “perennial student,” as one of my college professors called him, Hamlet suffers from that most modern of disorders, overthinking. You can imagine why I might be interested in reading about that.

For the bulk of the play, too, he falls back on passive-aggressive tactics rather than instigating any kind of confrontation. (Not that I can identify with that!) When we meet him, he’s muttering double-edged responses rife with undetected hostility to the cheerful queries of his loathed uncle-turned-stepfather. Why the cloudy countenance, Hamlet? asks uncle. “Not so, my lord; I am too much i’ the sun (son),” Hamlet snarls. Later, Hamlet uses a traveling troupe of entertainers to act out his father’s murder, publicly demonstrating to his uncle I know what you did while leaving everyone else in the room clueless. Only when all hell has broken loose and his own death is imminent and absolutely certain does he act directly and decisively. Consequences don’t matter anymore; the game’s over.

**

You may remember these lines from one of the play’s most famous monologues:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

The fact that most of us aren’t operating under the terrifying onus to personally avenge a murder, vigilante-style, doesn’t mean that Hamlet has nothing in common with us. Au contraire. It’s far too easy to lose one’s resolve and be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought whenever one considers embarking upon an insecure venture or risk of any magnitude. The more one thinks, the more spooked one can become. There are always a million possibilities for failure, for unintended consequences, for doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. Second-guessing can turn into ninth- or tenth-guessing, and suddenly one is completely paralyzed. An acquaintance of mine who now lives abroad with her Portuguese boyfriend and organizes writers’ trips to Paris and Rome recently wrote in her email newsletter, “If you overthink it, you’ll never do it.” I guess she would be one to know about that.

Of course, as a friend recently put it (regarding a work-related confrontation that did not go well), sometimes we’re “not eager to touch the stove again.” Like the proverbial rat in the cage who just got a painful electric shock, maybe we’re reluctant to step on that lever one more time — no matter how badly we want the cheese. After a lifetime of the “thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to,” actually, we may be tempted to just lie down on the floor and whimper like the dogs in Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness experiments.

**

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. T.S. Eliot’s poem became an immediate favorite of mine the first time I read it in high school. J. Alfred Prufrock, whose name alone is not exactly that of a hero but more like that of a comical character out of P.G. Wodehouse, stands vacillating in his upstairs hall, wondering Do I dare disturb the universe? He frets and fusses and makes dozens of “visions and revisions” before going downstairs for “the taking of a toast and tea” — where he loses his resolve. A somewhat clownish figure like Brazil’s Sam Lowry (whom I talked about in this post), with a head full of impractical dreams and longings, he is all too aware of how he must appear to other people. (“But how his arms and legs are thin!”) More like Polonius, Hamlet’s resident fool, than its title character, he is, perhaps (to quote from another earlier post), too small for what brings him alive.

Alas, poor Prufrock, I know him well. As a fellow clown, I’ll let him wear this little red nose I’ve got that honks when you squeeze it. The kids love it! Once we’ve done our Kabbalah homework and burned off that desire to receive for the self alone, we won’t feel so sorry for ourselves…

I do remember being a little shocked when I read somewhere that the J. Alfred Prufrock poem was a favorite of Monica Lewinsky’s. Then again, who said she was stupid? Intelligence and judgment aren’t the same thing. No, what strikes me as so incongruous is that she exhibited a confident recklessness so utterly contrary to that character, and utterly foreign to anyone remotely like him. This chubby, giggly kid fresh out of school flashed her thong at not just some sought-after schmoe like the most popular guy in her senior class, but at the leader of the free world. She (as well as the rest of the country, and maybe the planet) might have benefited from some overthinking in this case (!), but I’ve got to hand it to her for sheer unmitigated chutzpah. She may forever live on in infamy, but she sure didn’t allow herself to be paralyzed by the prospect. That’s probably a weird thing to admire, but methinks Hamlet could have used some of that quality a bit earlier in the play.

**

Ah, where is that happy medium? Is there one? I could, for example, go crashing into one of my staff meetings like a baby elephant, flattening everything in sight; I could sit and wait and say nothing, trusting or at least hoping that things will work themselves out. Sometimes delicacy and forbearance are warranted in times of upheaval. I’m reminded of a book written by a widow that we used to carry in the grief section of the bookstore where I worked — Don’t Ask for the Dead Man’s Golf Clubs. Obviously, she had encountered some staggering obtuseness from acquaintances so preoccupied with their individual agendas that they lost all sensitivity and respectfulness regarding the situation, all awareness of her needs and feelings. I never want to be that person. I’ve been told, however, and by more than one individual, that I actually err too much on the side of the needs and feelings of others, that I defer to the point of virtual nonexistence. Hell, I’ve run down the wrong side of the field clutching the ball, and bounced the rival team’s touchdown triumphantly in the end zone. (Rabbi Berg and his Kabbalists, of course, would say this is a good thing.)

The problem for me and Prufrock and Hamlet and all our existential kin is that we just don’t have a clue what the right course of action might be, or when to take it. There are pitfalls at every step…contingencies…unforseen complications…wild cards…timing may be of the essence…what was true yesterday may not be true today…and there’s no one else on whom to pin responsibility but ourselves. My mother reads the Bible and prays, and trusts that whatever does or doesn’t happen is her interventionist God’s will. (As Dana Carvey’s church lady used to say, how convenient.) The ancient Greeks had a whole pantheon of gods to intervene in their affairs, and occasionally during a drama one would pull a deus ex machina and make a cameo.

(Hey, gimme a deus ex machina over here! No, seriously!)

Much of what we believe as human beings seems to me to be an effort to insulate ourselves from a lack of control over our surroundings. I often think of what poet David Whyte said about the way people talk about “enlightenment” — he opined that very often you could just as easily substitute the word “safety.” Lord knows, much of this strenuous soul-searching I’ve done over the years has been performed in the hope of attaining relief (safety?) from suffering and determining what, exactly, is in my power. All those manifesting gurus are so, so very seductive to me because they promise that the sky’s the limit — yet they can also enrage me with their blithe assessments of other people’s disappointments. (Oh, I’ve had faith, mister. About two hundred times. I’ll show you the scars to prove it.) If you think I’m a cynic, well, remember that inside every cynic is a romantic idealist beaten to within an inch of her life.

Verily, gentle reader, if my dearest wishes came true tomorrow, I would drop down on my knees and give thanks unto any deity you chose. I would believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Tinkerbell. You could tell me the moon was made of cottage cheese, and I’d believe you. Virginia Woolf was extremely astute to have a character in To the Lighthouse surmise that the prickly intellectual in her company must never have gotten to go to the circus. What are we, after all, but children walking around sad because we didn’t get any candy? It may be no more complicated than that. I don’t think I’m any more complicated than that.

**

But back to the question of action vs. paralysis. These are not the only choices; I seem to have overlooked the proverbial “third way.” Now, there certainly would have been far less of a drama to watch if Hamlet had stepped back with zen-like serenity and let his uncle the king work out his own karma, but it’s possible the latter would have promptly hanged himself with his own rope (literally or figuratively), the way the McCain-Palin campaign has in recent weeks with no help from a calm and smiling Obama.

The one spiritual teaching to which I keep returning, over and over again, is the one about nonresistance. It’s the Tao, the wisdom of water, which yields in all gentleness to whatever is in its path, and always flows downhill. We all know you can’t push the river — but good luck stopping it! Perhaps the wisest ones among us have learned to cease the tiresome and anxious struggle for control, and to simply accept whatever happens to be here. (Without all that stressful obsessing, who knows — the “right” course of action might become clearer.)

While this may seem counterintuitive to both the existentialist and the born-again Christian (not to mention the Secret disciple), it may be the most appropriate response to the most accurate assessment of our condition as humans. We are likely not the omnipotent creators of every facet of our experience. It’s doubtful that we’re ever going to be totally “safe,” and Jesus is probably not going to appear in the bathroom mirror and tell us His Plan while we floss. We definitely don’t have power over other people and their choices — nor should we. What we do have a say about is whether we’re going to resist or reject the way things stand (and fret over it endlessly) or whether we can surround whatever-is like water, and go with the flow.

Dude.

Really, that may be why surfers are like that. They spend a lot of time in the water, riding the waves.

Now there’s an adaptation for you. Hamlet, Prince of Malibu.

This sensation, achingly poignant and at the same time broader than the Atlantic, had been a touchstone of identity for me since my teen years, when I traded smug religious certainty for a sort of tragic-romantic existentialism. Namely, that worldview in which the noble speck of a human creates fragile monuments to him or herself in a vast and indifferent universe, pushing the stone up the hill over and over again, attempting to seize the fleeting day, and raging, raging, raging, against the dying of the light….you get the drift. Pretty much a no-win situation, which Camus and Thomas, among a multitude of other modern and postmodern artists, apparently considered hard reality.

Some precepts of this philosophy’s sobering conclusions are that you are utterly separate and painfully alone in the world, and that you have one brief and all too destructible life in which to try to achieve your desires and connect with other humans, against stiff odds. This lends a terrible urgency and weight to the undertaking of relationships as well as ambitions. This is all there is. The beauty of the flower, or the girl, belongs only to that flower or that girl — so pluck it! Pluck it as though you could save it for yourself and press it like a leaf between the pages of a book. In a world of only form, one loves only form, the particulars and acqusitions of an individual life that are as ephemeral as individual blades of grass. You love her delicate profile and her fondness for Vonnegut novels and her collection of vintage Bebop on vinyl. But is that the totality of what she is, really? What about when she ages, changes, gets Alzheimer’s? Ultimately, in such a world, everything you love is lost, like piles of old letters thrown in the dumpster by unsentimental relatives.

**

My aforementioned stay in New Mexico came after a turbulent and perilous year. The witty but darkly pessimistic boy I felt destined to “save” (inasmuch as anyone can be “saved” within that fatal paradigm), a lanky Argentinian actor with beautiful green eyes who turned me on to Depeche Mode and Christina Rossetti, decided he would rather rescue my endangered princess of a friend from the dragon of her controlling boyfriend than continue to be the center of my universe. Bereft of his adored particulars, his unique tale of woe and his sensual lips (as well as my life’s mission), all seemed lost, and I nearly threw myself in the river that ran behind our college campus.

I did not, however, and by school year’s end had decided upon a radical change of scenery to cleanse my emotional palate. I went to Santa Fe to live with a friend and make cappuccinos for affluent tourists and artists. But in that arty community there was still much to stimulate that pressing sense of ephemerality, that deep, ineffable longing. (No one had yet heard of Ani DiFranco, but another unknown, a young African-American Tufts graduate named Tracy Chapman, provided the plaintive soundtrack to our summer, strumming an acoustic guitar and cataloguing a host of hopes deferred.) The stark landscape emphasized my smallness in relation to earth and sky, while the art spoke to me of striving toward things that seemed perennially just out of reach, like beauty, ecstasy, knowing fully and being fully known, timelessness, completeness, belonging. This longing was never without an object — I always thought of someone specific, and always with a pang of if only. If only X and I could be together in perfect harmony, then maybe we could create a green oasis of consummate joy in this desert of boundless loneliness and certain death, and all the secrets of the universe could finally be revealed. (A tall order, yes, but it’s the “irrational” part of us that makes the wishes!) When my friend and I drove back across the country at summer’s end, I was already driving back toward someone. (Needless to say, that didn’t turn out in my favor either.)

**

I realized, in feeling those pangs of longing again, that I’d strayed from it for quite a while — intentionally. It used to be an integral part of what I thought of as my identity. What happened?

**

The shift had been slight, but it was the kind of slight shift that when made by tectonic plates on the ocean floor creates tidal waves in Indonesia. It started when I began to actually listen to those who had had “waking up” experiences that were all very similar. People who had broken down and broken through. I began to listen, because I was breaking down too. The things I had told myself about the world and other people for so many years had left me with little but layered accumulations of increasingly unbearable pain and grief. I was on the brink of losing it.

Of course, sometimes you have to lose the world in order to gain your own soul.

What I discovered that these people had in common was a fundamental experience of consciousness as the awareness of the seamless oneness of all that exists (which is true on a molecular level, anyway, we’re swimming in an atomic soup), and the conviction that all suffering begins and ends with oneself, i.e. one’s reactions and judgments. (Even Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl argued for that kind of choice.) They also possessed the deep calm of the assurance of indestructability, a sort of non-rational knowing that they had (enviably) experienced firsthand.

As I began to afford them the benefit of the doubt, I began to afford more trust to my own perceptions and intuitions of what might exist beyond the surface forms of things. For the first time in my life, I was able to start to separate my observing consciousness from my repetitive and mostly unoriginal thinking, the running (and rather depressing) narrative called What My F-ing Life Is All About. It was freeing to approach whatever presented itself without that precious backstory, that complicated personal mythology. Almost gleefully, I tossed out loads of junk and stacks of papers, acquisitions I had been holding on to for decades. At the same time I noticed that, within those external and changeable particulars to which I always become so attached in people, there inhered something that felt eternal in a very immediate way, a sort of luminescent presence too bright to be extinguished. Within myself I felt a powerful response, something greater than my pain, my frustrated longings, and even my perfectly reasonable fears. With these discoveries came a peace and a reassurance that could be articulated as nothing you truly love will ever die along with your love will never truly die.

I would never have thought that being so “irrational” would lead me to a place of far greater sanity.

**

Within my longtime worldview, as I mentioned, almost every challenge or risk felt impossibly heavy and deadly serious, not to mention full of hazards. Everyday disappointments took on the gravitas of irreversible loss; urgent attempts at achievement or connection gave way to inconsolable grief. What an awful burden I placed on the souls whose cooperation I required for my fulfillment! Is any wonder that my poor actor opted out of trying to fill the role of my Purpose and Salvation in life? No mere mortal with a belly button and a butt-hole should have to shoulder such a yoke. Nor should he have to support a dependency so dire that a sudden withdrawal of the needed “supply” could result in blinding hatred or suicidal rage. Yet I demanded this of more than a few hapless individuals, and — surprise, surprise! — every last one fled.

**

The “awakened ones” said: your happiness can’t depend upon what anyone else does, because you have no control over what anyone else does. Find the places where you react, and inquire. What’s really going on here? Where am I wounded? Where am I lying? Looking deeply this way removes the clouds of self-deception from your heart, and uncovers the sun that shines perennially underneath, the radiance of unconditional love. (For one example of such an inquiry, you can read about Byron Katie’s Four Questions in this past post.) When you’re not trying to control other people, and not resisting the way things are, you naturally return to your original state of well-being, and are able to act in a manner mindful of theirs as well.

This made an astonishing amount of sense. That so-called radiance was the “something greater” I started to strengthen inside myself by refraining from doing the rational, usual thing and following the dictates of fear and self-preservation. By following their lead and delving inquisitively into my own reactions and projections instead of withdrawing from situations that cause me pain, I’ve begun to bring to light a great deal of unconscious behavior in myself, fundamentally shifted my orientation to the world, and opened up to greater generosity and lovingkindness. (Spiritually sensitive people frequently tell me I actually “look brighter.”) When I look at what passes for common sense about interpersonal relationships in the popular books and media, I wonder if we haven’t severely limited our experience and growth out of a short-sighted unwillingness to go through the discomfort of embracing something other than what we’d had in mind. It’s easier, I think, to blame others for their inconsiderate freedom (the nerve of some people!), and shut ourselves down, shut out the contradictory noise that refuses to arrange itself into our pre-written symphony.

Maybe it sucks to not get your way. But maybe it’s not “the soil falling over your head,” either. Is this all there is? What if there’s more to what-is than you think there is?

**

Those more enlightened than I would say that to directly access the numinous (or divine, depending on who you’re talking to) and to feel the resultant wholeness removes the sense of separation that creates the longing for it. All I know is that for most of my life I stood in art galleries and museums feeling like I was missing something. These days what I’m missing, more often than not, is the feeling of missing something.

I’d like to think that’s progress.