I Know I’ll Have Troubles: A Meditation

“I know I’ll have troubles” is my Buddhist mantra of compassion, a constant karmic reminder from the conclusion of the story which most impacts my life. In my daily dharmic practice of “going through, not around” these words form an evergreen parable, as important today as when I was a child.

Every day, reading teaches me universal truths and local incongruities. Through an inductive process, I build a Unified Field Theory of Life, integrating the pasts, presents, and futures of narratives presenting characters who are unlike me, and yet, like me. They contain multitudes and multiplicities: language and experience; behaviors and emotions; seeking and avoiding; values held and discarded; challenges large and small; triumphs and defeats; parallels and divergences.

My maps of comprehension sketched out, I color them in as I orient myself through imagined lives, a mirrored multivalent Mobius strip. With my heart’s compass, my mind’s sextant, and a lifetime library as celestial charts, I navigate away from shore and shoals toward new horizons of emotional intelligence, empathy, and kindness.

The ‘orienteering guides’ of Dr. Seuss became the first legends I used to find my way. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Seuss’s works aligned with my most-watched PBS television shows like Sesame Street, Electric Company, and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Words begat wondrous worlds, sustained by imaginative illustrations. My child’s mind grew limber, rhyming, and rhythmic while absorbing and marveling at his mimetic mastery.

Seuss Enterprise’s recent decision to cease publishing six of his books containing racist and orientalist imagery, though, is welcome and long overdue. Critical analysis of historic-artistic legacies like Seuss’s is necessary to achieve the goal of ending racism, xenophobia, white supremacy, and misogyny. The curation of his work is not cancellation: there are still some Seuss titles worthy of praise.

My favorite Seuss of all is I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew (1965) because I identify with the privileged, carefree youth who lives “in the Valley of Vung” (or Jung?). Perturbed by problems from all directions, he drives toward an enticing mirage, the idealized Hegelian antithesis of never having troubles (at least very few).

I follow the young Vungian’s escape route as my own through escalating circumstances, never-ending mazes, sequential terrors, and ultimate disappointment. Unable to “keep out of trouble Forever”, he renounces his pipe-dream and summons the courage to return home. His tale is a Socratic self-dialogue in facing realities one would rather avoid. The book is a narrative about our lack of control, the path to true knowledge, and the battlefield of the self on which the war of life is won.

Solla Sollew is my ur-text, a consumer bildungsroman, “coming of age story”. The book reads as a Seussian Bhagavad Gita wherein Krishna advises Prince Arjuna to shirk his familial-warrior duties to head out on a Kerouac-ian road trip searching for lounge-pillow comfort in a fictional Shangri-La, the roundabout arc to enlightenment. Whatever paths I take, whichever obstacles I find in my way, Sollew is fortuitous all-ages wisdom.