Fear

I am afraid.

I had another topic all picked out for this week, knew what I was going to say, even which photographs to use, but then I became afraid.

Let me tell you about this fear, because it is instructive. Things are in a bit of flux at work. My role there is shifting and I am uncertain whether or not the new role is a good fit for me. I might have to look for other work. This scares me. (In the service of full disclosure, there are other factors: things going on with my parents, issues around money in our own lives, but this is the main one).

Here's the thing, though. This is a place where I have seniority over every other member of the nursing staff. I am respected and liked there. It is good work. And if I looked for other work it would be within the same institution and the same profession (with the same pay and same benefits, or better). And if I couldn't find other work accorded to my needs, I could just stay where I am indefinitely, perhaps not as happy as I could be, but perfectly fine.

(There is one mitigating factor I should mention: I am 56 years old and have every intention of retiring at 65. What this means is that if I am going to jump jobs I should probably do it soon; I would think that most employers would rather not hire someone who is going to be with their department only a few years and then start on the downhill slope to retirement. So, I do feel a bit of pressure, though not much, not really, since, as I said, I could just as easily stay where I am).

The point I am trying to make is not that I am a big baby to be afraid (though you may draw that conclusion if you wish). My real point is that I have very little control over the fear I feel or its degree. The small mind sees every threat as being essentially equivalent. This little tempest in a teapot is no different to my mind than a charging rhino (well, OK, maybe the degree is different, but you understand what I mean). I wonder why this is? I also wonder what one does about it.

The Dharma says that fear is a response to conditions, that like everything else in our world it is composed of one condition piled upon another until is appears to be real. When I think of conditioned existence, the image which speaks to me is of the Oogie Boogie Man in "Nightmare Before Christmas", a being who has no independent form at all, but is a burlap-enclosed bundle of smaller creatures. Toward the end of the movie, you recall, the covering unravels and the bugs run away, leaving nothing at all of Oogie Boogie. As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, "there is no there there". There is no reality to...well...most everything. Yes, I know how very real things feel, but that is just because of the solidity of the illusion. In Pali this is known as anicca, generally translated as impermanence.

All conditioned things are impermanent and all things are conditioned. When we say "conditioned" what is meant is that nothing in this world can arise without that which allows it to arise and that which arises from conditions will also pass away. We sometimes live in the delusional state of thinking ourselves independent of what surrounds us, but this is just an intentional blindness to reality.

A flower arises because of the seed or rhizome that was its source. The flower arises because there are the conditions of soil, water, air, nutrients, microorganisms and such that make it possible for it to arise. In the course of things, the flower lives its lifespan and comes to an end. The elements that made up the flower re-enter the cycle to become whatever is next for those molecules, perhaps me!

This cycle is no less true of Reid or a mountain or a table or a house. Just because dissolution and decay take decades or centuries is no proof against the certainty of them. Mountains arise from the conditions of motions of the Earth's crust and magma, the conditions of water and air and wind and weather. They are worn away by the same forces and, absent new eruptions or extrusions, our world will eventually be one large, flat mass. Everything is rushing toward an equilibrium of flatness, except that the rushing in this case is occurring over eons. It is an odd fact of human consciousness that we tend to think of that which we cannot perceive as nonexistent. There is far more to the electromagnetic spectrum than visible light, but what we cannot see cannot be seen, as far as we are concerned. Similarly, all things are passing away, but because of our limited sense of time, we can act in most cases as if it is not so.

Does all this help with my fear? Well, the rational part of it, sure. But the fear remains, its own free-floating creation made up of my mind's insecurities. The truly irrational, self-sustaining, cyclical aspect of this type of fear is that what the mind fears is dissolution of the known, the familiar, and yet there is nothing but dissolution. This is, I believe, what Yeats meant when he wrote that "the centre cannot hold..."

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

He was speaking of the Second Coming, but it seems to me that this is the nature of the world. This is certainly what the Buddha taught and thought. What causes suffering is resistance to the core truth that there is nothing which lasts in its present form. Not you, not your child, not Mt. Rainier. Nothing. Life is nothing but loss. The key realization is not that this is so, but that this is not a problem.

Nor is the fear. It is only a problem to the extent that I let it be in charge and run my life, to the extent that I resist and try to change it into something it is not or solve it with something that cannot (food is my favorite, of course, what's yours?)

An essay by Karen E. Bender in today's New York Times Book Review said something that gets to the heart of why I write all this into my blog:

Giving shape to a painful experience is powerful because it...doesn't stay trapped within us, unspoken, curdling--instead, the art of arranging and transforming it reduces the burden. It no longer belongs to only you. The process of assigning the experience a beginning, a middle and an end, of giving it form, is a way of mastering it. Each sentence contains the chaos--our experience becomes what we perceive. And the honesty in these perceptions...creates a bridge to another person.

I am afraid. I am alive. I am dying. I am courageous. I am free if I wish to be. There is no problem that is not me. There is no solution to any problem that is not within me. It is enough. Thank you for being with me on this journey.

Compassion

Compassion (Karuna in the language of the Buddha) is sometimes difficult to identify and to distinguish from self-indulgent and dangerous forms of involvement in the problems of others. When does compassion morph into co-dependence? When is seeming compassion actually pity, that emotion destructive to both recipient and giver? And what the heck is "compassion fatigue", anyway?

Those of you who have been reading this blog awhile (or who are familiar with Buddhist terminology) will remember that compassion is one of the four brahma viharas (the others are openheartedness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity). This is worth noting because the Buddha singled out these four states of being as those which were the most desirable places to spend our emotional time and energy.

The roots of the English word compassion mean "to feel with". When we can open our hearts to the suffering of another without letting our own needs and desires (for comfort, for being seen as one who is compassionate, for superiority over the sufferer) getting in the way, we can truly say we feel compassion. The key to this definition is that what we feel is not for us but for the other, the one who suffers.

Each of the brahma viharas has what is known as a near-enemy, something which masquerades as the real thing but which actually is a form of avoidance of the deeper emotion. In the case of compassion, this near-enemy is pity. Pity is thinking sympathetically of another's woes without engaging one's heart and has an aspect of subtle superiority to it ("poor dear") through which we actually use it to distance ourselves from the real experience of "feeling with".

Pema Chödrön also mentions a form of misguided pseudo-compassion she terms "idiot compassion":

Don’t impose the wrong notion of what harmony is, what compassion is, what patience is, what generosity is. Don’t misinterpret what these things really are. There is compassion and there is idiot compassion; there is patience and there is idiot patience; there is generosity and there is idiot generosity. 

For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, not to rock the boat, is not what’s meant by compassion or patience. It’s what is meant by control. Then you are not trying to step into unknown territory, to find yourself more naked with less protection and therefore more in contact with reality. Instead, you use the idiot forms of compassion and so forth just to get ground. 

So you sit there and you say, “Okay, now I’m going to make friends with the fact that I am hurting and afraid, and this is really awful.” But you are just trying to avoid conflict here; you just don’t want to make things worse. Then all the guests are misbehaving; you work hard all day and they just sit around, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, eating your food, and then beating you up. You think you’re being a warrior and a Bodhisattva by doing nothing and saying nothing, but what you’re being is a coward. You’re just afraid of making the situation worse. Finally they kick you out of your house and you’re sitting on the sidewalk. Somebody walks by and says, “What are you doing sitting out here?” You answer, “I am practicing patience and compassion.” That’s missing the point.

Sometimes it is compassionate to turn the beggar away from our door. Sometimes it is compassionate to say to the addict or alcoholic is our lives, "no, this time I cannot help you". Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do for our children is allow them to fail.

I recall an event in my son's life that can still fill me with deep feelings of sadness and pain. He was looking for a job after college and was very reluctant to approach businesses to put in applications because he was such a shy, reticent, hesitant fellow. I could have helped him do this. I even knew a couple of people who probably would have given him a job. But I knew, deep in my heart, that the truly compassionate road was to let him go through this experience, even if it meant he didn't get a job and could not meet his financial goals, which were very important to him. He was not asking for my help, so in this instance my compulsion to assist him was wholly centered in my selfish desire to avoid feeling the discomfort of grief and empathy for the struggle through which he was going. It hurts even now, almost a decade later. But I knew and know now that I was doing the right and the compassionate thing.

So what about this "compassion fatigue" idea? Can we truly open our hearts so wide as to wear out their ability to feel compassion?

No.

As a nurse, this is a phrase that comes up quite often. I confess that  I truly despise it, mostly because it means (so far as I can tell) absolutely nothing. Someone brought this idea up to me the other day in connection with a family member and I think she was fairly surprised by the vehemence of my reaction. So, what is this compassion fatigue stuff, anyway?

The first context in which I heard this term used was that of refugee workers who saw so much suffering each day that they could no longer feel compassion for the individuals in front of them. Perhaps if one is trapped in such a situation (by a long-term contract, for instance) and there is no escape, this term might occasionally have some validity. But in the ways it is usually trotted out, I find it a thinly masked form of emotional laziness and self-pitying martyrdom.

The example my family member brought up was this: a man we both know, who is in his 70's, owns a pickup. Because of this, many people ask him to help them move. After having done several of these moves, he admitted to being exhausted and wishing he could stop saying yes to these requests. This was diagnosed as "compassion fatigue". In my work I hear it used to describe the experience of being around too many sick people with too many demands on one's energy, which is a more common use of the term. What I find disturbing in both cases is that the persons involved did not take responsibility for their feelings. In the first instance, of course, what is required is the emotional maturity to simply say, "No, I won't help you move." It can be said without rancor or apology, simply, "no", full stop. As for my fellow nurses, doctors, and others in our field, I would say that what they are experiencing is more likely pity than true compassion. Because compassion does not involve my needs at all, there is nothing to burn out or decay. I suspect, as Pema noted, that what is truly fatiguing is the need to control and the failure of our strategies to do so, which failure is bound to happen in the face of the uncontrollable which, for the most part, both other people and their diseases are.

The 14th Dalai Lama

We must also consider those for whom compassion has been and is a way of life: Jesus, Mother Teresa, Quan Yin, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton, Pema Chödrön, Albert Schweitzer and others. All of these felt/feel great compassion for others at all times and did not fatigue in the process. One of the greatest dangers we face is when we label such people as saints and their deeds beyond our ken. Central to the Buddha's message is the fact that he was a man like any other, the implication being that any of us could achieve what he did if we orient our hearts toward true compassion.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion--The Dalai Lama

Regret

An email from my mother got me thinking about regret. My dictionary says that regret is to feel sorrow or remorse for (an act, fault, disappointment, etc.) The Buddha would define it quite differently, though. He would say, I believe, that it is thinking of the past as if we could change it to something more desirable. The importance of this definition for me is the recognition of the sheer futility implied. We cannot change the past any more than we can write upon the ocean. Nothing is more ephemeral than the past, unless it is the future. There is no reality save what exists in this moment.

Intellectually, we understand this. The past has passed and will never be again. But there is something fundamental in us, it seems, that makes it desirable, imperative even, to relive our past deeds and characteristics as if to do so serves some distinct and worthwhile aim.

"Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past." —Anne Lamott

Perhaps most pernicious is the nugget of a poisonous idea that we deserve to feel regret and remorse for things we have done, said, felt, lost, or broken. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the saying goes, the coal can only stop burning when you drop it. This is essential: you do not deserve to be punished for your misdeeds. There may be some need on the part of the society to impose a penalty, but if you truly feel the wrong of what you have done in your heart, make what amends you can, and set out on a path that does not involve repeating the wrong, you have done the sum total of what it is possible to do. Anything else is not only masochism but a waste of your precious energies, which could be devoted to freeing yourself and others from the bonds of false belief, the highest calling it is possible to have. And what better antidote for remorse than this?

Here's a formula for you: if there is something you regret, face it head on. Acknowledge your fault wholly. Make what amends you can, if possible in a face to face meeting with the wronged person (if there is a person involved), otherwise in as direct a fashion as possible (eg, if you stole money, pay it back). Then LET IT GO. You have done all you can with this regret and it can no longer be of any use to you. I am aware this is far more easily said than done, but it is the intent that is most valuable. To see the regret for what it is, a vestige of an event far in the past that only has power to harm while you allow it, is to put yourself on the road to healing.

Not that grief, pain, and remorse cannot, to a certain extent, be healing in their own right. If we blithely passed over the death of a loved one or the end of a cherished bond, we would hardly be human. But to wallow in these as if the pain itself had value is an odd vestige of a time when we humans were required to be ever-vigilant and dwell on our failures because to forget them could be deadly. When a predator nearly caught us through an act of negligence, perhaps a momentary lapse, it was worthwhile to vividly recall the event. But we no longer live with that kind of threat and have the intelligence to learn a lesson without flagellating ourselves with it.

The Buddha said:

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. 

and 

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere.

These are not casual ideas to be given lip service or to be hoped for and not practiced. Rather, these are at the very core of the teachings of the Buddha. We have only so much energy to divvy up among the many demands of our minds and bodies. To waste one more second on the past than to glean from it what lessons it has to give is to carry in our arms the corpse of one we loved. It is dead. To bury it is to do it the full honor it deserves.

Thus have I heard.