Prickly

I hesitate to say that I am a prickly person. It has long been my belief that to label oneself as some particular kind of person is to make such a thing more completely true and less subject to change. For instance, those who call themselves "shy" or "angry" or "lazy" seem to me to be giving in to being these and not allowing for the possibility of being bold, kind, or ambitious.

But I think I'm probably pretty prickly.

It's not that I'm an old grump, though I can be that at times; mostly I'm not. But I hold people at arm's length and don't even know I'm doing it most of the time. It has become more and more clear to me the further I pursue this path that the reason for this is that somewhere deep within me I believe that people are not trustworthy.

Now, before you try to convince me otherwise, to demonstrate to me that you and nearly everyone else is indeed trustworthy, let me preemptively say this: I know. I know that people are, generally speaking, pretty trustworthy. I know that the world is, generally speaking, a pretty safe place. But that is my higher mind, and it's my higher mind you would be speaking to if you tried to talk me into trusting. Like it or not, though, it is that primitive part of my mind that is mostly in control of these feelings and reactions. To it, there simply is no percentage in trust. And from the perspective of that reptilian brain it is correct: the world is unsafe, dangerous, hostile and frequently fatal; why should I trust? Assuming that everything is a threat is the most certain way to meet every threat with preparedness, n'est- ce pas?

Of course, this primitive mind fails to even consider, nonetheless comprehend, the suffering that proceeds from such a belief system. That actual threat is rare in our current world is entirely irrelevant to the way of thinking that believes only constant vigilance can ensure I will not be taken unaware when a threat comes.

There is a question which is often posed in recovery circles, the answer to which is supposed to be obvious, "Would you rather be happy or right?" This morning I realized that the answer for me is quite often, "Right." To be honest, I would rather be right. No, really. Being right is important to me. Letting someone believe something that is wrong is some sort of sin in my twisted little world. Calling "bullshit" when I see bullshit is as reflexive as flinching when something as thrown at my face. In some cases this can be a form of integrity, maybe even quite often. But it might also just be the need to be right.

Which makes me kinda prickly, doesn't it?
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Now, I don't want you to think that what I am about to say is self-pitying. I have wanted to talk about this in the blog for a while but have been reluctant because I don't want to seem as if I am feeling sorry for myself. I really am not.

You see, for some time I have realized that most people have (or at least seem to have) a great many friends that they call on or see with some frequency. I don't. I sometimes envy them their cadre, but most often I am very content to be by myself. Nonetheless, as a symptom of something, of this prickliness (hmm, it just occurred to me that the noun form of the adjective "prickly" might be "prick"; no comment), this lack might well be significant. And I know it has to do with trust.

I have had the experience (as have many of us) of abandonment. I am not going to do an armchair analysis of myself, at least not here, but I know that if you disappoint me, I will simply turn away. This is not fair or reasonable, but is one of my most deep-seated characteristics. And before you can reject me, I will reject you; ha! beat you to it! Or, closer to the truth: you can't push me out of somewhere I never consented to go, like your heart, your friendship, your trust, or your love. No, thanks just the same.

I'm not unfriendly, I know that about myself. I am quite often cheerful, helpful, kind, considerate and encouraging. I genuinely like being around people. But I can't afford to let any of you get too close. I have had too many experiences of wanting that and opening to it only to be turned away. It hurts less to avoid it altogether. This has become entirely reflexive; I have no idea I am even doing it, so the lack of intimacy seems to be coming from outside of me rather than inside. Oh, my, now that does sound self-pitying. This is so hard to talk about without sounding that way, but it's really not true. How can I explain? Should I try?

I am more of a cat than a dog, I guess. Cats can be social if they choose, but have very sharp lines of demarcation (called claws) that determine just how social they will be and put a period to any intimacy extending beyond that boundary. There is nothing wrong with this; they are just expressing their catness. Dogs are social by nature and thrive only in that arena. Their only limit to sociability seems to be the word, "more". I could never be a dog.

Which, I know, makes me...well...prickly. So be it.

But....

But what if this is just another form of suffering? Franz Kafka said, "You can hold back from the suffering of the world, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided."

Michael de Montaigne said, "The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears." Hmm.

Perhaps yet more telling, Ram Dass says, "We must go beyond the intellect into the silence of our intuitive hearts, where separation disappears and knowledge gives way to wisdom."

So this is all a matter of fear, or so it seems to me. I am afraid. We are all afraid. Afraid of what? I don't think we really know. The kind of pain we feel most commonly is precisely the kind that is no real threat to us. Our primitive minds can't differentiate one kind of pain from another, though. Pain is threat. Unhappiness is pain. It is to be avoided. Loss of intimacy leads to unhappiness leads to pain. To not be intimate is much safer. An odd and unsatisfying formula, I admit.

Stephen Levine: "Float your pain in an ocean of mercy."

[I can feel myself avoiding the inevitable next conclusion. I want to close the blog and publish this post (or, better yet, don't) and go on with my day. I can feel the closing in of the intellect around the feeling.]

Laura van Dernoot Lipsky: "If we are truly to know joy, we cannot afford to shut down our experience of pain."

I would rather not be prickly. I don't know how to be otherwise. I have been this way most of my life. It feels safe and reasonable and right. In nature, all those prickles have a use, a purpose. They allow for the safety necessary to the flowering of the potential of what lies within. Can that be true of me?

A disconcerting weekend

I have felt a bit off-kilter this whole weekend (I include Friday) but for very good reasons, or so it seems to me:

Polly's Last Ride

¶ Our dear Polly, the car I have written about before, was hauled away on Friday. She had stopped running altogether and we finally decided to donate her to our local classical radio station for whatever they could get . It was jarring to see her up on the bed of a tow truck and being driven away. She has been a part of our lives for so many years (16, to be exact) that it was like putting down a beloved pet. Kathy said that Polly is now an organ donor, allowing other cars to go on living with the parts she supplies; I like that idea, though I keep having images of the crusher reducing her to a mere wafer....If you have never had a car you truly loved, this may seem mawkish and silly, but the feelings are very real.

¶ Kathy is out of town this weekend and that is always disorienting. We have been married a long time and have become part of one another's rhythms. Not that time alone is not welcomed; I think anyone who has been in a long-term relationship recognizes that no matter how much we might love the other, a bit of entirely self-determined time is a wonderful thing. Still, I don't quite know what to do with myself sometimes when she is gone.

(I just realized that Kathy and I have been married for 32 years and had Polly for 16. Half our married life! Is there any significance to that? Probably not...).

¶ The weather is absolutely perfect this weekend. Though I wouldn't even think about complaining, weather like this triggers thoughts of needing to do something active and outside every single minute that it's so nice, just in case I never see weather like this ever again! In my whole life! This might be it! Ah, but I have wash on the line, there are butterflies in the garden, the cherry trees, daffodils and hyacinths are blooming, the fuschsias are sitting outside soaking up the sun, the pumpkin seeds in our basement seed-starting operation (well, it might be a bit pretentious to call 32 little planting cells an operation, but I like to think big) are growing bigger practically by the minute, and I am sitting out under our big holly tree writing my blog post. What could be better?

¶ I woke up this morning to realize that my fears from last night were justified: somehow or another, the entire contents of the SD card on my cell phone had disappeared—Poof! After I got over it, though, it made me realize that there was a bunch of unnecessary crap on there that is just as well gone. It was surprisingly freeing to start all over, especially with my music downloads (or is it uploads? acrossloads? what do you call it when you transfer from one storage area (my computer) to another (my phone)? And don't tell me it's called "transferring". I can't stand a damn literalist). Still, just when you think the world is a fairly safe place, your SD card gets erased. Jeez.

Tarek Mehanna

¶ I have been watching the first season of "Game of Thrones" on DVD and reading quite a bit of the New York Times as well as some news blogs. It's disconcerting to see how we are not so different from the "red in tooth and claw" medieval world portrayed in GOT. Don't we ever learn? I have also been reading more about the abrogation of civil rights we are putting up with these days and it really makes me wonder how we ever went so far astray. For the record (lest we forget), the Constitution says that I can say, write, think, or watch anything that does not lead to actual harm to others, OK? Look up the case of Tarek Mehanna if you are not yet concerned about this; you ought to be. It's not that I admire the guy or support most (or perhaps any) of what he believes. But he has the right to write about it, think his thoughts, to translate works that support Islamist jihad, and all that. He just does.

¶ After several weeks of research and thought, I put together a lecture about burnout and "compassion fatigue" in nurses that I am giving soon. I will be speaking to nursing students who are just months away from graduation and (according to their professor) all nervous and uptight about the possibility of burnout. (He says that the top two fears among young nurses are killing someone and burnout; that seems about right. People are pretty hard to kill, though, in my experience. Well, not my personal experience...I mean...oh, never mind). In any case, writing this lecture got me to thinking quite a bit about all this, about how malleable our minds are, how subject to the influence of both negative and positive input, yet how there are limits to this. We seem to have a predisposition that is beyond ready change, though I also know (from my own experience) that having a spiritual epiphany can shift the landscape considerably. In any case, I am 22 years into my career as a nurse and not burned out. I have worked in a burn ICU, a heart and lung transplant ICU and an HIV clinic. Not exactly cheery places, so it's not that I have chosen fields that would guarantee a lack of burnout. I really do think that how one orients one's thoughts makes a huge difference.

 I think it would be easy to be pessimistic in our current world. I used to be a cynic, but finally realized that, far from being sophisticated, cynicism is actually, ultimately intellectually lazy. Put another way, where is the benefit in thinking the world a deeply flawed place and humans a plague visited upon it? Where does that get us? Yes, we are environmentally in trouble but, God, today sure is beautiful, isn't it?

What I think I know

There are some days I truly wonder if I understand anything at all about what makes things tick in our world. It has been my aspiration to make some sense of the world, but that may just be another brand of insanity. I am even still naïve enough sometimes to think the world might in some fashion be just, but really find very little evidence that this is true.

There is a radio in my head, one channel playing the You Are The Best station (on the Top Ten: "The World Revolves Around You"), the other the You Are Scum Network. (I borrow the metaphor from Anne Lamott). Sometimes one channel is louder than the other, sometimes it seems as if one or the other has permanently gone off the air, only to come back louder than ever. I woke up the day before yesterday with  the hit song "Failure, Failure, Failure, Failure, Failure" playing in my head. Not a favorite, exactly, but a Golden Oldie for sure. I can never be a good enough ______________; fill in the blank--son, brother, nurse, man, Buddhist, human being....

Here's the thing: I know better. But the feelings are very, very real.

Sometimes it seems to me that I have glimpsed THE answer, but can't articulate it. Some days it feels as if the answer is, "No", some days "Yes", some days "I don't know". There are times I am convinced it is "Acceptance" and others when it seems it might be, "Oh, no you don't, you son of a bitch!" Oddly enough, when I am what appears to me to be most in tune with the universe, the answer often looks like All Of The Above, not that all are separately true but that, antithetical as it may seem, they are all the same answer.

Part of the mythology of Buddhism is that we are all serene beings, but there are as many different kinds of us as there are people, which is to say no two are truly the same as far as I can tell. The more honest we are, the more bewildered. Shouldn't one simply be able to decide to be kind? Choose calm? I don't think I'm cut out to be the serene type. I try for kindness and get there more often than I used to, but admit that's a bit paltry, even if it is the best I can do. What events make of us such solid stuff? We are born as soft as butter and harden to obsidian and no one asked of us which shape we will take."O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt". Please, I'll have a dollop more patience and a soupçon less judgment; thank you very much. But I have never even been offered the menu. I suppose it's just as well; if anyone thought I chose this life intentionally they would only shake their heads.

But this much I know to be true: as uncomfortable as it sometimes may be, the uncertainty is more true than the certainty. Being a solid self is a fantasy; I am forever in flux and to cling to the reality of the previous moment is to miss out entirely on this one. At the core, the Buddha was trying to say little other than this. I am less certain every day who I am. Why does such a good thing feel so dangerous?

Eightfold Path: Wise Mindfulness

The Buddha once spoke a rather odd little parable (found in the Sedaka Sutta) that goes like this:

"Suppose, monks, that a large crowd of people comes thronging together, saying, 'The beauty queen! The beauty queen!' And suppose that the beauty queen is highly accomplished at singing and dancing, so that an even greater crowd comes thronging, saying, 'The beauty queen is singing! The beauty queen is dancing!' Then a man comes along, desiring life and shrinking from death, desiring pleasure and abhorring pain. They say to him, 'Now look here, mister. You must take this bowl filled to the brim with oil and carry it on your head in between the great crowd and the beauty queen. A man with a raised sword will follow right behind you, and wherever you spill even a drop of oil, right there will he cut off your head.' Now what do you think, monks: Will that man, not paying attention to the bowl of oil, let himself get distracted outside?

"I have given you this parable to convey a meaning. The meaning is this: The bowl filled to the brim with oil stands for mindfulness immersed in the body. Thus you should train yourselves: 'We will develop mindfulness immersed in the body. We will pursue it, hand it the reins and take it as a basis, give it a grounding, steady it, consolidate it, and undertake it well.' That is how you should train yourselves."

But why? Why would we take on such an arduous training? We could take the Buddha at his word and simply believe that there is some virtue in this. But the Buddha himself recommended against this path, exhorting us to find the worth of his teachings for ourselves and even to reject those in which we could find no meaning. So what worth is there is such mindfulness?

What the parable tells us is that mindfulness is nothing other than to be entirely in this moment and that the object of our attention is in fact far less important than the mindfulness itself. But why should this be? How can something as simple as full awareness of the breath, for instance, be the basis for anything other than fruitless naval-gazing? What could possible be the use of something so simple in such a complicated world?

In the Maha-satipatthana sutta, though, the Buddha says that "this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and distress, for the attainment of the right method, and for the realization of Unbinding".

A wise teacher, Ajahn Thanissaro, has described  the relationship of mindfulness to the Path in this way: Awakening is the ultimate destination, the peak of the mountain we are climbing. Mindfulness is the way we stay on the path rather than becoming distracted by all the other paths and byways we can travel, the taverns and inns we could visit along the way.

What is difficult for me is coming to grips with the idea that a practice so simple can be so powerful. Mindfulness is deceptively simple in description: it is nothing other than being fully and completely aware of whatever is within our awareness in this moment. This can be the breath, another person, a flower, a building, a bomb, a telephone—take your pick! Though it may seem odd that this can be such a powerful practice, we need only remind ourselves of the nature of suffering to see how helpful it can be. Since suffering is the seeking for things to be other than they are (and samsara, the world of suffering in which we live, is composed of only these impulses), one can easily accept that mindfulness in the present moment is the "anti-samsara" and will lead to the end of suffering, which is the ultimate "Unbinding" referred to above.

If there is any residual doubt that mindfulness of breath or mindfulness of any other object can lead to such ultimate Awareness, we need only think of these as exercises, as the development of the psychic muscles required to apply this to our everyday lives. Yet even this is only a partial truth. In the end, it doesn't really matter much how we develop our mindfulness, whether it be in contemplation of a flower or contemplation of death. The ultimate truth is contained in the fact of mindfulness rather than its object. Or, put another way, there really is no difference between mindfulness of a flower and mindfulness of death. One is not more (nor less) important than the other to contemplate. Mindfulness is a progressive conditioning and in the final analysis whether we practice on a banana to better understand God or on God to better understand a banana is irrelevant to the fruition of the path, which is to know with all our hearts that they are One and the same.

God

The next step on the path is here. Some more thoughts on mindfulness are here.