“Every day might not be good, and that’s good.”
This is a quote from a Grumpy Cat calendar that I’ve had on the wall of my cubical for the past year. I’m getting rid of it now, as part of a tidy-up, but I just wanted to take a moment to honour it and reflect on it.
Grumpy Cat (for the three people who might be Internet savvy enough to read a blog, but not enough to have come across Grumpy Cat) is a cat that looks permanently grumpy, and has been part of a long-running series of memes in which she is apparently saying or thinking grumpy things (the actual cat had a genetic condition that caused the grumpy appearance and is, sadly, no longer with us – but her owners took many pictures of her during her life so we can continue to bask in the glory that is Grumpy Cat for years to come).
Its her job to “say” grumpy things, and we are expected to think “Oh, how adorably pessimistic and grumpy!” in response.
But I’ve been reading some Koans and Zen writings for my bed-time reading lately, and I’ve been amused by how often her “grumpiness” sounds a heck of a lot like something one of those old Zen masters would tell their students.
The point of a Koan (or Kong-an), if you aren’t familiar with them, is to encounter something that doesn’t match what you expect – something that takes received wisdom and says “but what if that’s not how it is after all?” and leaves you to think through your presumptions and assumptions. After mulling over a Koan for a while, you might end up changing your mind about something entirely (you realise the mountain isn’t so big after all), or you might come to a different understanding of it (you understand that the mountain is big for reasons you never previously considered), or you might realise you’ve been looking at the wrong thing the whole time (the mountain is irrelevant). And different people get different things out of the same Koan – it all depends on what assumptions you have that need shaking up.
Grumpy Cat frequently says something good is awful or something awful is good, and if you look at it in the right light, that’s a very similar thing to a Koan.
There’s an old Zen proverb “Every day is a good day”, and I have to admit that Grumpy Cat’s rejoinder (perhaps not intended as part of a Zen discussion) tickled my fancy.
“Every day might not be good, and that’s good.”
“Every day is a good day” is supposed to remind you not to compare. Taking each moment on its own merits, with nothing to compare it to, and no vision of what it “could” be if things were otherwise, there is no reason to believe today is anything other than a good day. Or, as everyone’s favourite doomed Shakespearean character* famously said: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.
Yet, as Grumpy Cat points out, it might not be good.
You can try to say “oh, but if you can’t compare it with anything else…”, but let’s face it: sometimes to be truly “in the moment”, you have to acknowledge that this moment is not “good”. If you’ve just been in a car accident and you have to wait for someone to cut you out and you can’t feel your legs, that is not a good day. If you’re watching someone you love die slowly and painfully from a repertory illness, that is not a good moment.
Even without comparing it to anything else, you can say that this moment, just as it is, is objectively terrible. And that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be good. We don’t have to pretend it’s good, or convince ourselves that it could be worse. We can meet this awful moment on its own terms and say “well, this is terrible”. It is what it is.
“Every day is a good day”. But it might not be good. And that’s fine.
