Book Notes: When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön is an American Buddhist nun who runs a monastery in Cape Breton. The book is short. The chapters are short. The teacher's voice is the voice of a friend who has been through hard things and is not selling you anything.

I bought the book in an airport bookstore the month after a long relationship ended. I read it on the plane. I read it again on the train back from the airport. I have re-read it every couple of years since, usually when something has fallen apart.

The central instruction

The book's hardest gift is this: when something falls apart, the impulse to put it back together — quickly, and the same way — is not always wisdom.

Sometimes the falling-apart is making room for something. Sometimes it is showing you something about yourself that the put-together version was hiding. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is stay there, in the wreckage, longer than feels comfortable, and let the wreckage tell you what it has come to say.

This goes against everything the productive self believes. The productive self wants to repair, replace, restore. The productive self also frequently rebuilds the same dysfunction with new wallpaper, and is then surprised when it falls apart again in two years.

On the fundamental ambiguity of being human

Chödrön's word for the basic condition is groundlessness. We do not know what is going to happen. We do not know if the work will hold, the love will hold, the body will hold. We never have known. We have only had stories about knowing.

When something falls apart, the stories about knowing are temporarily exposed as stories. This is uncomfortable. It is also true.

She writes:

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again.

The first time I read that, I was angry. The second time, less. By the fifth, it was the most reassuring sentence I had ever read.

What the book asks of you

Not optimism. Not even hope, exactly. The book asks for a particular kind of friendliness toward yourself in the worst moments — a willingness to stay with the discomfort instead of trying to outrun it.

This is not stoicism. The Stoics would say bear it. Chödrön would say be with it, gently, like a friend with a friend. The difference is small in word and very large in body.

If you are in a falling-apart right now — and most of us are, in some quiet area of our lives — this book is one of the kindest companions I know.

A line worth keeping

She writes, near the middle:

The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Make room. That is the whole instruction. The book is just two hundred pages of helping you remember.