Resentment

I resent someone. I don't hate her. I even understand why she's doing what she's doing that frustrates and infuriates me. She has her reasons and they are actually quite good ones. I might well be doing the same thing if I were in her shoes. This realization doesn't help much.

Now, this is worth remarking on mostly because it is not all that common for me. I don't often resent, not any more. But I used to be a world champion resenter. I could resent you for eating lunch. Breathing my air was an unforgivable offense. I could warm up a hundred or so resentments between the time I woke up and the time I opened my eyes, a thousand before breakfast, and pretty much everyone I encountered by the time I left the house.

When I needed to make a list of resentments as part of a spiritual program I undertook, China was on my list. Not just the country and its government, but every single one of the billions of people who lived there. Just because. China. Billions. I didn't mess around with Luxembourg or Venezuela. China.

But what was revealed by the effort to seek a better way of living my life was that resentment was a mask for fear. Actually, I have come to the conclusion (with some help from my spiritual friends) that not only resentment, but anger, unhappiness, depression (in many cases), greed, lust, cruelty, violence, and hatred are all fear in scary masks. Because fear is wimpy, dontchaknow, but hatred, ah, now that feels like a manly sort of thing.

Resentment made me feel superior to all of you (certainly all of China), and I needed to feel that way because I feared that I was actually grossly inferior, in fact not worth the skin I was printed on, worthless. But I found out that this was not so, that I am merely human and pretty much as worthwhile as anyone and everyone else. Sad but true, the hierarchy of worth is, in fact, artificial and largely nonsense, no matter what Ted Cruz may think.

And resentment, as the saying goes, is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die. It only contaminates me. Certainly the Chinese remained unharmed by my vitriol. As part of the path I had undertaken, I had to examine my resentments and find out what part of them had to do with me, with my fears and hurt feelings and confusion. Which turned out to be...oh...all of them.

Which is not to say that people don't do shitty things or that we should let them get away with them. For one thing, someone who is cruel or violent or abusive to me will undoubtedly find another victim, and I have a solemn responsibility to prevent that if I can. But the idea that it will have any positive effect whatsoever for me to stew in the juices of hatred is just absurd on the face of it. In fact, change for the better must begin from a place of acceptance and love; working from a place of anger will only exhaust me and lead to more harm.

So, to return to my present resentment. Because I don't resent all the time and have become very comfortable in my peace and sense of well-being, now even a single resentment feels like a shard of ice in my heart; cold, sharp, hard, painful. I can't stand it. I have a feedback mechanism now that tells me when I have gone there. This is healthy and right.

The solution, I am told (and have experienced) is to wish for this person everything I would wish for myself. I wish her health and well-being and peace and harmony and love. I wish for her to be comfortable and healed. I wish for all her dreams to come true. I wish her miracles. I wish her joy.

It's not easy. I am selfish. I want what I want and I want it now. I wish I could say that I am motivated by pure altruism, but the truth is that I don't want it to hurt anymore. That's OK. Why I do good things is not as important as the fact that I do them. I will have to wait a few lifetimes down the road for sainthood. But at least the Chinese are safe from my wrath. Bet they're relieved.

Delight in the Difficult

While walking home from the grocery store today I dropped a gallon of milk. The plastic split and all of the milk spilled on the sidewalk and into the street. I was grumpy about this as I walked back to the store until, fully formed and without my volition came into my head, "Don't cry over spilt milk," which made me laugh.

This is a minor unpleasantness, of course. It is just milk. I have enough money to buy more. It's a hassle and a waste, but it's no big deal. But we all have experienced much more bitter disappointments, failures, and disasters. The challenge of delighting (a subject I began last week) is much greater with the difficult things we must face than those that are wonderful or neutral. This is where the grist for the mill of mindfulness resides.

It is easy to say that one should merely accept all things as being as they are. While this is true as far as it goes, the problem is that some things really do feel very odious. Pain is by definition unpleasant. The death of a loved one feels as if it will rip us apart. Loss of our dreams, hopes, aspirations or good fortune digs a deep pit of despair. To say we should accept these things with equanimity seems more than just a bit facile, the breezy recommendation of one who has never experienced them. (I wrote a post a few months ago about The Happy Bird, who asked that everyone "sing a little happy song when every little thing goes wrong". The point of this story is that everyone wants to strangle the little shit).

A good friend of ours has a young friend (only 20 years old) who was in a terrible car accident a few weeks ago and may not have much of a recovery. When my friend went to a coworker and said, "This just isn't good", her friend immediately said, "Oh, we don't know it's not a good thing!" Well...yes, we do.

Acceptance is not denial. Acceptance is the idea that everything is as it is. There is no judgment of good or bad in acceptance. Everything must be as it is because if it could be otherwise, it would be. Wishing it were different cannot make it so. Wishing it were different, inveighing against how bad things are, how those who don't deserve such suffering should not have to go through such things, and how those who are evil sometimes get much more of the good than they should, does not tip the scale one way or the other.

What such thinking does is increase the suffering in the world. The Buddha spoke of two darts; the first dart is the original injury, which he acknowledged is not a pleasant experience. But the second dart is this insistence that the first dart should never have injured us, that it's not fair that we should be hurt by a dart when so many go unhurt, our demand for justice. We read all the time about families who carry bitterness and a desire for revenge for years after a loved one has been hurt. I see them as bristling with darts, weighed down by the poison of them. And only the first of those darts was put there by someone else.

How much more wonderful would it be if we could find it in our hearts to accept what is, not to believe that all things are "as they are meant to be" or "part of God's plan", but merely that they are as they are. We can delight in the difficult because it gives us the opportunity to practice what we know of the Dharma, to look to the Buddha and ask how this can be the road to enlightenment. There is an answer in who he was, in what his teachings are, if we open our hearts to them.

Wotan

August 14, 2013

Let me make a recommendation: until you have seen it for yourself, don't let anyone tell you what Wagner's Ring Cycle is about. We think we know something about Wagner (he was a bit of an asshole, the Nazi's loved him) and about the Ring (looooooong, weird story, women on flying horses, they played that cool song from the helicopters in "Apocalypse Now"), but for years I have been told that the Ring packed an emotional punch that could not be appreciated without first-hand experience. Now I am beginning to understand what was meant. So, you might still not want to sit through it, but don't let anyone tell you it's boring or overbearing or dark. It's none of these.

I am in the middle of the four-opera cycle. I took the whole week off work to make this feasible. On Tuesday I saw "Die Walküre" (that's the one with the flying women--well, goddesses, technically) and, hoo boy, it was not what I expected at all. I even read the story and the entire libretto before plunging into the operas. This did not help much. It is (as I probably should have known) the music that communicates with the soul and sends the deep currents of feeling into the heart. What I think most of us have not appreciated about Wagner is that the overriding theme of all his work is the redeeming power of love. And, as Wagner well knew, while love is often delightful, it can sometimes be very, very painful.

Wotan

"Die Walküre" is, above all, about the love of a father for his children. Who knew? Wotan is a god and made up all the rules to please himself but, as he sings at one point, "I am caught in my own trap". It turns out that if one has any integrity at all (and he has plenty), the rules must apply to all beings, including the god who made them. Even when it means abandoning his two most beloved children to the fates they have chosen.

Every now and then someone will ask me what it's like having a child and I am fond of replying, "Oh, don't worry about it, it's just like having meat hooks in your heart. Every time your child has the slightest misfortune--tug!--it feels as if your heart is being pulled from your chest. And if you are the cause of that misfortune in any way--tug! tug! tug!--you feel as if you will never heal again." (You do, though). So, I understand, to a certain extent, what Wotan feels when he must consign one of his children to death and the other to exile.

In another very important way I can empathize with Wotan. Which of us has not wanted to put a ring of fire around our children? How else can we protect them from the harms and tragedies of everyday life? (Speaking of which, there was an excellent article in the New York Times of August 4 about the trauma of being alive). But unless you are a god (you're not, trust me on this), the ring of fire will not work. It will, in fact, most likely be seen by your children as the problem rather than protection. And even if you are a god, the outcome may not be what you hope for, in fact, most likely will not be. Wouldn't, after all, Brünnhilde have been better off with a common mortal for a husband rather than a hero? But I can tell you from personal experience that the urge to shield our children from all harm is something that never leaves us.

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August 17, 2013

Tonight is the last of the four operas, "Götterdämmerung", which is about as long as it's name. (In fact, some wag was wearing a shirt the other day which transformed the title into "Göttdamnitslong". Funny). This last opera in the series is also the longest, a whopping 5-1/2 hours (including two 30 minute intermissions). What amazes me most, I think, is that 2900 people (the hall's capacity) fill the place. Seattle Opera does three full cycles, meaning that 8700 people voluntarily sit through 17-1/2 hours of Wagner (which calculates out to 152,250 total Wagner hours, in case you were wondering. You weren't? Oh, well). This is an event, and many people do it every four years, or more often if they go elsewhere to see a Ring. This is astonishing to me. And, of course, that's only the numbers for the Seattle production. In other places, most notably Beyreuth, it is performed nearly every year for much larger audiences (about 58,000 per season), and there are dozens of places around the world where it is staged.

I have enjoyed opera for four or five years. I have been told that The Ring is the ultimate opera-going experience and one cannot call oneself a true opera buff until it is checked off the list. Before going, I might have said, "until it is endured", but I kept an open mind about it.

And now, of course, I understand what was meant. Wagner treats every theme of grand drama and nearly every aspect of a human life in these operas. A bold statement, I know, but it appears to be true, or nearly so. And I have to believe that I have only scratched the surface. There is more scholarly (and not so scholarly) writing on this cycle of operas than (I would bet) all other operas combined.

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August 18, 2013

Well, it didn't feel 5-1/2 hours long.

So, now I have experienced the whole thing. Is it all that? Actually, yes, it is. I have concluded over many years of considering works of art that, for the most part, they concern redemption or the lack of it. Think of "Romeo and Juliet"; the world of Verona is entirely out of balance and only through the sacrifice of the title characters is order restored to the world. Redemption is achieved. Of course, Shakespeare followed the story arcs that were considered classically mandated (though he played fast and loose with many other conventions), so all of his plays follow this basic formula. In the tragedies the redemption takes the form of death, whereas in the comedies it is usually reunion and the clearing up of misunderstandings. In the romances the form redemption takes is generally the restoration of balance through a shift in power or the contravention of authority. (If you want to get into a rousing discussion of all this, raise with a Shakespearean scholar the lack of redemption, which is to say, complete resolution, at the end of "The Merchant of Venice" and what that might mean). 

In the Ring cycle, Wagner has given us redemption writ large. Yes, yes, it's all about Norse gods and outsized heroes, but that's just the story. What it's really about is the fact that life is full of opportunities to make good and bad choices and all of us fall on the latter side at least as often as we do on the former. And what do we do about that? Wagner would argue, I think, that there is a universal right and a universal wrong and to restore the world to order, one must atone in direct proportion to the deviation from the Good. For you and me, that usually doesn't mean much: say you're sorry, pay back the money, change your behavior. But if you are a god and have entirely disrupted the balance of nature, utter destruction of all you love is the only course. Harsh toke.

I won't go further, at least not now. I don't want to risk being overbearing with my own passions. But if someone asks you if you want to spend 17-1/2 hours at the opera some day, maybe you will consider the possibility. It might just change your life.

Pain

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."

--Hamlet, William Shakespeare

Life has been difficult lately and this morning I hit my head. Hard. On a kitchen counter. Wham! Ouch.

The past week I have had back pain, the like of which I have never experienced. I know how bad back pain can be and that many people suffer from it chronically. My pain is not as bad as that (though pain is very subjective, so who's to say?) and it's only been a week, so it feels a bit silly, selfish even, to complain. But it hurts, man. I don't like it.

There's troubles at work, too. Much of that is of my own making. The job is changing and I don't like the way it's changing. The management has changed and I don't like the way it changed. Personnel have changed, the whole atmosphere in health care is changing and uncertain, the economy is causing administrators to squeeze and to justify every dollar spent, which increases the pressure on us to justify our existence. Then there is my acting out in response to stress, which has had consequences, which adds to my stress.

And I'm too damn busy. And there is too much suffering in those I love. And the world is a mess.

Nice, huh?

Then there's the kitchen counter. My physical therapist wants me to do chair push-ups to strengthen my shoulder (which, as long as I'm doing the pain recital, has been bothering me for over a year)  and I did the push-ups with a wooden chair. Bad idea. Chair (which was pushed against counter) collapsed and I broke the fall with my head. No loss of consciousness, but significant loss of dignity. And a big old knot on my forehead for a long-term reminder. Kathy decided to stay home from work to monitor me to make sure I act no stranger than usual so if I do she can rush me into an emergency CT or something.

I'm the luckiest man in the world. Think I'm kidding? I'm not. I have a loving wife who cares if I have a head injury and insists on being here for me. I have something to do about my pain. I can laugh and pick up the pieces of the chair ("cheap piece of shit") and lug them downstairs. I can afford to buy a new one. I have access to a CT scanner if I need one. I have a physical therapist who is helping my shoulder heal. I am 57 years old and up until now I have not  paid much of a price for my age and the fact that I did many foolish things as a kid that should have had more serious consequences than this. I have a job and it's not in jeopardy, and if I dislike it enough, I can probably find another one. All the things I am "too damn busy" with are wonderful things I have chosen.

And then there's this: one of the things the dharma has taught me is that, as the saying goes, pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. When I am able to focus on the pain and not on my resistance to the pain, when I can meditatively consider it, really look at it, not with fear but with curiosity and interest, it is transformed. Not that it no longer hurts, but the nature of the pain is changed from one of a problem to just another opportunity to practice awareness. And in awareness is freedom. And in this freedom, taken to its logical extreme, is nirvana. It's all grist for the mill. It is only in my small, controlling, whining mind that this is not so. All is well.