Struggles

I hadn't realized it has been so long since I last posted here. My father has died since then. I will turn 60 in a bit over a week. I'm having a hard time right now, though I'm not quite sure what the first two statements have to do with the last.

Sometimes it feels like a loss of faith. Not faith in any particular thing, because I did not start out with faith in a god or a system or a plan. I have been an optimist, but no Pollyanna. I am not at all sure that everything will turn out just fine, and I am damn sure things don't happen for a reason. And if you tell me about god's plan one more time....

No, it's more like a loss of faith in the point of it all. I know that sounds very depressed (and depressing), but that's not how I mean it, believe it or not. There is in me the sense of the foundation somehow having been shaken. I know that the political climate in the U.S. and in the world has something to do with it. I have a deep belief in the efficacy of kindness and reasoned thought, but neither of these are much in evidence in the world these days. It's almost as if the majority of people see this as the end times and feel that unless they give their maximal energy to anger and vindictiveness right now, disaster cannot be averted. What they do not seem to realize is that it is the anger that is the cause of the destruction rather than its cure. And I see this from every direction in America's political divide, a nastiness that subsumes and consumes everything in its path.

I also had an experience recently which shook my faith in my marriage. It was a minor tremor, really, but it caused me to realize just how much of my well-being is tied up in the health of that connection. I'm not so sure this is healthy. Because it will end, of course. That is the central lesson of the Dharma, that all things end. Love is a guarantee of loss, because either the relationship will end or one or the other of you will die. Ha! That sounds awfully grim, I know, but is the simple reality of such things. And to have a little off-handed, casual comment cause such tremors in me is pretty frightening. On the other hand, if this is a wake-up call to nurture and heal what we have, then so much the better.

And I know it seems petty in comparison, but some of my perturbation is that most of my technology is rebelling against me. My internet goes down periodically for no reason whatsoever (who knew that going from copper wire slow internet to fiber optic fast internet would be a problem?) and my brand new laptop has a malfunction so bad that it must be returned to the manufacturer for replacement or repair. Crazy-making.

I miss my father. He was a sweet and wonderful man. He taught me a great deal. He was a man of deep faith, and I respected that more and more the older I got, even if I did not share his belief. He died April 7.

But, what the heck! On June 11 I will be 60. I will be in Portland that day, enjoying the city and going to Sweeney Todd with my much beloved wife. We will visit gardens, hiking trails, book stores, restaurants, parks, and coffee shops. All will be well. I love my life and am very fortunate to be living it. So be it.

If I find y

I found a piece of cardboard on the ground the other day
An almost finished sign scrawled on it that said,
If I find y

And I wondered

What would have completed that sentence?

Perhaps...

If I find you have been sleeping with my wife...
If I find your wedding ring...
If I find you dying, crying, bleeding...
If I find yogurt-covered raisins...
If I find youth...
If I find yak...
If I find young, nubile women...
If I find yesterday...
If I find your conversation scintillating...
If I find yanking on this chain causes the world to end...
If I find you on fire...
If I find yellow daffodils...
If I find you have a terminal disease...
If I find yams all hot and steamy...
If I find you all hot and steamy...
If I find yodeling annoying...
If I find years and years and years have gone by and I have no idea why or how and you have been here all that time and I am grateful and it makes me stronger and love being the only thing that matters feels less each day like a cliche and more and more like a hard, cold truth...well...then...

I will:
Run for help
Fight
Scream
Come find you
Look the whole world over for you
Search for you until I die

I will:
Love it
Love you
Cherish you
Hug it
Hold it
Treasure it
Yes
Yes, even the yak
I promise

If I find y

My input was not sought

Last Sunday I went to the memorial service for my good friend Debbi. I have written several times here about her and her progression toward death.

Toward the end of the day, after all the songs had been sung and poems recited, the memories relived and rehashed, I was standing at a large, beautiful collage of photos, all of Debbi at various stages of her life, lovingly put together by her husband, Sam. The whole trajectory of her life, from beginning to end, laid out in such an orderly way. I turned to my daughter-in-law and said, "death is chaos".

Death is Chaos.

It's the best I can do. I wish I could be of more comfort, but as far as I can tell, this is the truth of it. Because death (or, more accurately, grief) is felt in the heart and not the head, I cannot think my way through this thing. Intellectually, death makes a lot of sense. We all know it's coming, and thank goodness for that. Life would have little meaning if there weren't a period at the end of this particular sentence (living a semicolonic life would be misery, I think). In Debbi's case, it was particularly clear that death was a desirable ending to her last chapter. She had been suffering, in one way or another, for over a decade, and the last year or so she was almost entirely immobile. If you knew her, you know that was a form of hell for her. So—good on her for dying, we all say.

But....

But grief is experienced by the heart, and the heart knows no such thing. The heart still expects to be able to pick up the thread of a conversation, finish that letter, make the visit not made. The heart knows only infinity; it doesn't consider the possibility of endings. It's not that the heart shies away from them, mind you, just that it never occurs to it. To the heart, death is as if one had awakened with legs where arms used to be and vice versa. No matter how much everyone told you that this was a normal state of being and to be expected, still, it would come as something of a shock. One might even be rather skeptical of the reassurance. It would feel like chaos. Such is the heart's incredulity.

I suspect this was, at least in part, what T.S. Eliot was speaking of when he wrote:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
(From "The Four Quartets")

And it turns out, at least in my experience of it, that once activated, grief is indiscriminate. It becomes greif for every damn thing, every relationship I neglected, every opportunity that passed me by, every experience that never came my way. In the final analysis, we struggle to make sense of the finality of things not only because it makes us sad but because our hearts cannot fathom the utter completeness of loss. There is no going back there, to that person, to those moments.

John Updike:

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market—
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.
("Pefection Wasted")

But I think the poem that most captures how the heart speaking to the mind feels is "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lillies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains;—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Good-bye, dear Deb. I love you and am glad you are at peace.

But my heart does not approve.

Family

I don't write  much here about my extended family because I don't want to violate their privacy. I'm certainly not going to start now. But I went to California last weekend to help celebrate my brother's 60th birthday and want to write about how that was.

My brother and I have not always been close, at least not in a conventional sense. We have, more so than my other siblings perhaps, been enmeshed with each other's feelings and reactions, but throughout our childhood and into early adulthood this was not a good thing. Our acute sensibility of one another mostly took the form of anger, hostility, and confusion. This all started to change about 15 or 20 years ago and  our relationship has progressively improved to the point where he is now one of my favorite people in the world. This was hard work on his part  and on mine. To be able to go to his celebration felt as much like the culmination of a glorious progression as it did like a birthday party.

rb photo © 2013

We have a beautiful family. No, really, we do. We're pretty darn white (though some progress is being made in that regard), but for all that we are amazingly diverse. And for a bunch of middle class (mostly) white people, we do pretty well at  being joyful in each other's company, cutting each other enough slack to make this family thing  work. We love each other and it shows. We accept each other for what and who we are and, hey, no reason to sugarcoat it, there has been a lot to accept over the years. I wish this made us just the average family, but that's not what I see. It seems to me there is a great deal of grudge-bearing and vindictiveness in the families I know and experience through others.

Through all of the time that some of us were being obnoxious twits (I'm talking about myself here, though if anyone else feels the shoe fits them, feel free to put it on), our hearts have always been in the right place, or so it seems to me. Am I  being a bit of a Pollyanna here? I suspect some of my family would say so. But that's my observation. Where push came to shove, we have always had each other's backs. Even now it  is not all sweetness and light by any means—my sister couldn't come to our celebration because of a crisis with a grandchild. But we persevere.

rb photo © 2013

Our celebration was on the Northern California coast, about 40 miles south of San Francisco. It is a beautiful place, full of wildness, wind, and weather. It was cloudy, sunny, rainy, warm, freezing, foggy, and perfect, all in the  space of three days. We ate together, sat around fires, roasted marshmallows, went to the beach, and even visited the Boardwalk at Santa Cruz.

rb photo © 2013

I fulfilled my Bad Uncle role by encouraging children to play with sticks they lit on fire. I mean, what could possible go wrong, am I right? I am proud to report that (to the best of my knowledge) no one was permanently scarred and I'm fairly certain my nieces are still talking to me. I also had an 11-year-old tell me she wasn't sure I counted as an adult. A proud moment.

But the real  pleasure was being in each other's company. I know this sounds like any family anywhere, but I feel the miracle of us coming together every time we meet. Frank Bruni, in his New York Times column of May 26 (published while I was in my little tent cabin on the coast, a sweet coincidence) notes that family "aren't people [we] would have likely made an effort to know or spend time with if [we]'d met them at school, say, or at work.... They're less tailored fits than friends are. But in a family that's succeeded at closeness, they're more natural, better harbors." A safe harbor, that's exactly what it feels like when I am with my family. And, I must say, I don't really feel that way anywhere else in the world. The way our world is currently constructed does not consistently create communities in which we can feel accepted and at home. To have that, I must go find these people, wherever they may be.

Our parents moved around a lot, not from one community to the next, but to new homes within the Sacramento area. Which is to say, we have no edifice to go home to, no family manse, a physical structure to give solidity to our "familiness". I for one don't miss it, though. It is these people who make the safe place for me to come to rest. I will just keep going where they are. It's a good place to be.

Uncertainty

There's a lot going on right now but it's difficult to know how to write about it here, at least without sounding like I'm whining.  I'm not  whining. No, really....

I am reminded by a loved  one that getting things out of my head is always helpful, no matter what. On the other hand, I don't want to feel as  if I am vomiting all  over these pages as a way of making myself feel better. Nonetheless, here goes:

• The nature of my work is changing. 


• My son and his wife are moving away. This is a good thing—she is going to graduate school—but Michigan is a long, long, long way from here.


• My mother has been  in a skilled nursing facility for several weeks getting IV antibiotics for a persistent infection. She's home now, but is still not entirely well. Both of my parents are just plain old. Meanwhile, my shoulder has been giving me trouble, making me feel as if I am getting there myself.


• My friend Debbi is dying.


• I have a coworker who's husband is going through much the same process that Debbi has, but he's only at the beginning.


• My relationship with my wife is shifting. Of course, this happens all the time, as anyone in a long-term relationship can attest. But the big changes are more noticeable and the big, noticeable changes come to pass when big events intervene.


• I have lots of committments to travel, pretty much entirely around my family. These are all good things—my parents, my brother's birthday, visiting my son and his wife (and their lovely kitties, to which I am both deeply attached and seriously allergic, an interesting combination). It is all very good and seriously stressful in aggregate.


• When I am stressed (no surprise here) I tend to eat to excess. As I have shared before, I am not an eat-the-whole-cake kind of overeater. To borrow from  the lexicon of alchoholism, I am a maintenance overeater, not a binger. Which has its downside in my ability to remain in denial about it while I am stuffing my face. And (this is key) my lack of discipline about my eating actually adds to my stress rather than relieving it. In the moment it feels good, but then the feeling  of chaos that comes with being so out of control just adds to the stress.


• OK, and this is the hardest one to write about: I just don't feel very connected to my fellow human beings. My communication with family, coworkers and friends is cursory and strained much of the time, when it happens at all. I yearn for more meaningful contact in my life and fly around trying to be all things to all people falling short (I mean, who wouldn't?)

I have nicknamed all this The Five D's: Distance, Dissolution, Disease, Disability, and Death. A cheery group. The point here is, though, that these happen to us all and happen all the time. We are all moving away from each other, if not geographically, then emotionally. We are also all moving toward each other; it is a shifting dance. Dissolution, Disease, Disability, Death—these are in the nature of what it is to be alive, at least if one does not die young. We must all face the dissolution of who we are today in order to become who we will be tomorrow. That it happens gradually for most of us is no proof against having to face the reality of it.

I know that much of what goes on with me is a lack of trust. My meditation group was talking about this just the other day. I don't trust easily and do so rarely. I have pretty good experiential proof that people are not trustworthy. Life itself is one patch of shifting sand after another; it's hard to even trust the ground upon which I stand. Which is the whole point! Yes, the Buddha would say, yes, now you've got it! Nothing is substantial, all is shifting, cloudlike, unable to support your weight. Lie back. There is nothing to do. Nothing to be. Nothing to become but free. It is enough.

Who, me?

When I describe someone, I sometimes wonder how that person would in turn describe me. The hope is that it would not suffice to say, "You know, that asshole". I'm pretty sure that's not it. But is has occurred to me that "intimidating" might be an adjective one would choose. I remember once (not long ago) I said to a boss, "I don't think of myself as the least bit intimidating". "But," she bluntly replied, "you are". I have suspected for some time that, especially at work, I am more respected than liked. Not a bad thing (it could be neither!), but not the most desirable condition.

I don't know what to make of all that, but I do know that I have discovered, by being more aware of how people respond to me, that I am most certainly not the person I wish to be. I view myself as open, kind, loving, and generous. I'm not, though. This is not a morbid reflection, just an observation. I was in conflict with a family member not long ago (I wrote about it before) and what became most evident was how very unclear I was (and am) about the effect of what I say and how I am. In many important ways I am entirely blind. What a discovery to make this late in life.

I suppose that in some ways this is quite good—what it implies is that I both care and am noticing how what I do ripples out into the world. I have to assume that prior to this awareness I was blundering through and creating wreckage everywhere I went while thinking I was doing pretty damn well. I have a coworker who, it seems to me, believes she is a benign force in the world, a person who is both doing well and doing good. But my perception of her is of a steamroller, flattening those who don't agree with her perception of what is good and truly perplexed that anyone could disagree with her vision of how things should be. After I get over being annoyed with her, with a jolt I realize I do exactly the same thing! I am not accusing either of us of malfeasance; I think we're both just clueless about our impact in the world. I'm trying to get a clue here, that's all.

I have always distrusted the idea that we abhor in others qualities we dislike in ourselves, either consciously or unconsciously. It seems to me a concept too smug and simplistic. And yet, when I look around me, that idea seems to conform to what I see. Another example: there is a meditation teacher in my town who I really don't much care for because he is self-satisfied, cranky, aloof, and intellectually arrogant. Hmm...sound a bit familiar?

This could easily begin to seem like unstinting criticism, but that's not what I'm getting at, not at all. I am pretty fond of myself (odd how in the West this sentiment has come to be seen as vanity, whereas in most cultures it is simply assumed that people think well of themselves). On the other hand, as Suzuki Roshi said, "You are perfect just as you are...and you could all use some work".

There is also a place for full-hearted acceptance of myself as I am. But I admit to being a bit confused about where acceptance leaves off and complacency begins. I don't want to be a jerk and leave it at that. "Oh, well, I broke your toes stepping all over you, too bad, that's just how I am". On the other hand, I can't and won't be eternally subject to the opinions of others in how I shape my actions and attitudes. That way madness lies.

Guest House

This being human is a guest house...

I came into conflict with two people I love over the past week. It caused me a great deal of pain. I struggled mightily with so many different emotions and impulses that I felt half-crazed much of the time, as if all of who I was had been exploded, the foundations remaining but the House of Reid destroyed. I know this sounds like hyperbole but, then again, I am not telling you how it really was, merely how it felt. Whenever threatened, the ego makes the event into The Biggest Thing Ever. It is death. It is disaster.

It's not all that hard to fall into the trap and believe the stories the ego is putting out, either (we do it all the time). When in extremis, the ego is also quite skilled at assigning blame, feeling self-righteous and superior in its suffering (a particular specialty, I think), engaging in rationalization and justification. You will note that I do not use personal pronouns which speaking of the impulses of the ego. As one of my teachers says, what we are dealing with here is THE mind, not MY mind. If it were mine, for one thing, I would be much more in control of what it thinks, which I clearly am not. I speak to it quite often, telling it I am thoroughly done, thank you, with certain memories of shame or remorse, but it has...well...a mind of its own, so they keep arising anyway.

This being human is a guest house

Every morning a new arrival

A joy, a depression, a meanness....

When I give in to the impulse to think that such events are unmitigated disasters, I am forgetting the most basic truth of all: life is change. It is when I can see the leveling of my ego, my pride, my self-image as not only inevitable but a good thing, when I recognize that dissolution is going on all the time and that in times of crisis it just becomes more obvious than at other times, this is when I can choose: on the one hand, to grow into the new being I was headed toward in any case, or on the other to resist the transformation and suffer, inevitably causing those around me to suffer, as well. I could, in other words, use up huge amounts of energy bolstering the crumbling walls of my Self (which is the self of yesterday, of last week, of a former life) or I can choose to accept the dissolving of the barriers as the gift it is. It is truly a gift; this is something of which I must always be aware.

This being human is a guest house

Every morning a new arrival

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

My existence is a delusion of the moment I am in. Of course I exist, I can prove this in any number of ways (Monet kicked a rock). But to think of myself as a solid, unchanging being is sheer delusion. This is no less true of my inner life than of my body. I have the choice to embrace this reality or reject it. The one is the road to joy, the other to suffering. Of course, even my resolve to accept myself as impermanent can be an expression of ego if I am not aware at all times of the impulse to make it so. If I feel that I am in any way superior to others because of this or if I think I have Gotten Somewhere as a result of my understanding, then I am placing myself at the same risk I was in before I ever had the realization. These concepts are by their very nature ego concepts. Put another way, if I truly inculcated this understanding into my being, the concept of achieving anything (being superior, right, accomplished, real, a Good Buddhist) would have no function, since there would be no ego to consider it important or even acknowledge its existence. This is, by definition, the end of suffering.

It is also true, though, and just as true, that criticism of myself is a manifestation of ego. This can be tricky. To justify any and all actions as being mere manifestations of ego and therefore excusable (because they were not done by Me) is also to live in delusion and has the potential to be extremely destructive. But to dwell upon my unskillful actions as the manifestation of who I truly am is just as egotistical as if I only praised myself. And in our culture it is far more common for us to obsess on what is wrong in us than on what is right.

The Guest House poem by Rumi is one of the guides to my life; I try my best to live by it. He goes on to say,

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

We don't know. Nothing is more universal than this not-knowing. Even those things of which we are most certain are subject to dissolution, decay, and death. The great Zen masters make it clear that while there is nothing more important than believing in Zen, it is also and equally true that there is nothing more dangerous than believing in Zen. I believe that what comforts me is essential to my well-being, but this recent conflict with my loved ones and the outcome of that conflict (the growing into a better, more loving human, I hope) makes clear that I am, quite simply and clearly and absolutely entirely, wrong. The end of suffering is renunciation, the renunciation of any concept of who I am or where I ought to be or what I should achieve. Even peace, enlightenment, kindness, openheartedness, love can be sources of suffering if I have some internalized measure of progress toward them or claim to have achieved them. It is part of the paradoxical nature of Buddhism that when we feel we are closest to having accomplished something with the practice, we are farthest from getting anything of true value from it.

Pema Chödrön speaks eloquently of this delusion when she writes that "when you start to want to live your life fully instead of opting for death, you discover that life itself is inconvenient....You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably...." But, she goes on to say, "sometimes when you just get flying and it all feels so good and you think, 'This is it, this is that path that has heart,' you suddenly fall flat on your face....You say to yourself, 'What happened to that path that had heart? This feels like the path full of mud in my face.'" This is how I felt this past week, as if I had found the path with mud on my face. The key is to know that this is neither a bad thing nor a good thing. It's a thing.

Sometimes I can overcomplicate events (well, OK, quite often, not just sometimes). I require reminders that this is all extremely simple if I let it be. I have the impulse to judgment, which is really just the belief that I know best and the world has nothing to teach me. Yet, as Rumi says further,

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whomever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

He is not speaking of the malice, meanness, or misbehavior of others; Rumi is referring to what comes into my own mind, into my own heart. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that does not have the capacity to open my heart if I let it. Those dark thoughts, that shame, the remorse, the meanness, the hurt, the anger, the vulnerability and the accompanying shame that I am so vulnerable—all of these are my teachers. Sometimes I am just a little slow on the uptake; this is not my teachers' fault. One of my favorite sayings (I call it Reid's Rule #1) is, "If you set your expectations low enough, you are bound to fulfill them." But yesterday, while speaking with friends, I realized that I should restate this (rather cynical) statement to read, "If you set your expectations low enough, miracles are much more likely." I can open my heart to all that is. This is simple. It is also a miracle.

On Friday I had occasion to call a tech support line. The person on the other end was not a native English-speaker. He was doing very well at explaining what I needed to know, but then departed from the script a bit. His grasp of what he was saying in the vernacular may have been a bit imperfect, but it ended up being a lesson I needed to hear and bear with me always. I said that this whole process was pretty complicated, to which he replied, without any sense that he was making a joke or (I don't think) any thought that it might be tactless, "Oh, no, it is very easy. You are just not getting it."

I am just not getting it. The Buddha had great patience, but one wonders if he wasn't sometimes a bit exasperated and wanted to say, "For heaven's sake, this is very easy. You are just not getting it. Stop with the judgment and the breast-beating and let it all go. The only reason you are making such a big deal of all this is because it makes your small mind feel important. Let it go. It is enough."

ADHD? OCD? OK? LOL! TMI? tl;dr

I read a fascinating article in the New York Times last week about autism and how useful the specific characteristics of the autistic person can be to some businesses. It is a mind-bending speculation to think that the recent uptick in incidence of autism might not just be an increase in identification of those who are autistic and others on the same continuum (Asperger's and such) or an insidious development at all, but might actually be a step in the evolution of the species in response to our predilection for technological advancement. This thought is certainly not original; google "autism as human evolution" and you will see a plethora of articles on this subject. (In passing, I should note that due to the somewhat antisocial nature of this disorder, it is difficult to see how those on this spectrum have a reproductive advantage, which would be necessary for this development to truly be an evolutionary change. It has been demonstrated to be hereditary, however, at least to a certain extent).

Now, I know it's de rigueur to consider oneself somewhere on this spectrum, just as a decade or so ago to declare one's affiliation to ADHD was popular and even now OCD remains a somewhat attractive label. One wonders why we should be so quick to embrace these labels, and to do so fairly inaccurately. My brother was diagnosed with ADHD (then simply called hyperactivity) when he was quite young (he was taking Ritalin when it was still experimental) and his life has been made much more difficult by it. Why would we choose to co-opt suffering to ourselves? Why, for that matter, would we want to diminish the adversity faced by those who actually have a disorder by appropriating it in a (more or less) lighthearted fashion? I suspect the explanation is that having a label on which to blame our more antisocial or obnoxious characteristics is comforting and supplies us with a built-in justification for unwonted behavior. ("Oh, honey, I threw out your cockroach collection in a fit of OCD; I'm so sorry. But you know how it goes!")

Which is all by way of me doing precisely what I have just described! Here's the thing: I felt a frisson of identification when I read the Times article. I have quite often in my adult life felt one step removed from the social interchange that seems to come so easily to others. Of course, I know how dangerous it is to "compare my insides to other peoples' outsides," as the saying goes. It could just be that I am introverted (another label, eh?), which I certainly am. But the spectrum characteristic of being contented with repetitive tasks also feels mighty familiar. There is a particular list I maintain at work that I know would be enormously tedious for most people but for me is a true pleasure, and I become faintly irritated when interrupted while working on it. (Maybe I'm OCD? Heh). Just yesterday I spent several hours connecting a new television and all of the wires and cables that go along with having associated electronic components. Loved it. Perhaps I'm just patient.

Another thing: I marvel when witnessing my fellow humans engaging in lighthearted conversation that then, by all appearances, leads to association, which yields, in some cases, real friendship, wherein they voluntarily spend time together. Just being together. Strange. I don't mean to make light of this; I truly do marvel at these behaviors. They seem as odd to me as spontaneous human flight. I would be about as astonished if you stepped off a cliff and just kept walking on air. I scratch my head in perplexity when I witness unforced bonhomie. My interpersonal relationships tend toward banter, which serves the purpose of distancing me from any lasting connection to my fellow humans.

From an article describing Asperger's syndrome:

They are not content to be alone all the time and they long to form friendships with others. Since they cannot read social or emotional cues well, they come off as insensitive, pushy or strange, yet have very little insight into how they are perceived. They have very little idea how to make a friendship work. [Emphasis mine].

Hmmm.

Don't get me wrong; I really do like being around people and can hold my own in social discourse. I am even well-liked in my small social circles; I know this. I have a close, loving, intimate relationship with my wife and with many of my family members. Yet I am also aware of a certain arm's-length orbit around me that keeps most of those I know comfortably unknown unless I make a vigorous effort to bridge that chasm. I also don't want to give the impression that I have no true friends or intimacy. I have both, though these are select and few. Perhaps this is just as it should be, I don't know. But sometimes I envy the (seemingly?) easy affinity I see around me, the crowd of loved ones some people seem to effortlessly gather around them, to attract as adroitly as politics attracts fools. I have even tried to make myself more like a person to whom this might happen, without much success. Oddly enough, I have quite warm relations with a handful of relative strangers I encounter on my round of errands every Friday—the lady at the dry cleaners, the produce manager at my favorite store and others. I love to listen to their stories and even, sometimes, their troubles. Yet, of course, this makes its own kind of internal sense—they are not likely to become my actual intimates and our discourse is limited by time and circumstance to a narrow band of my attention.

I belong to an organization that emphasizes "fellowship". People go around talking about how much this means to them and how they couldn't survive without it. It is something they seem to have gained purely as a perquisite of being a member and take entirely for granted. I once again shake my head in wonder. I have even out-and-out asked what the hell this is all about and how one goes about getting some of this fellowship stuff. I get queer looks. But in this same organization I had the experience just recently, when all this fellowship blather (so it seemed to me) was going on and I was feeling on the outside once again, of wanting to raise my hand and ask, "Is it O.K. if I'm happy anyway?"

That's the thing. Overall I'm pretty happy. I know what your next question will likely be: then why worry about it? I don't know, it just looks like fun to have that warmth and intimacy all around me. Maybe that's only for a certain type of person. I was never destined to be a great basketball player, either; that doesn't make me less-than, just a person with specific abilities, talents and characteristics, none of which are particularly well-suited to a career in basketball. Or to widespread familiarity. I think of it as "the Brussels sprouts phenomenon". I like Brussels sprouts. Some people (OK, most people) can't stand them. I am convinced that I actually taste something different than they do. I don't like walnuts at all, but most people love them. My brother can't stand the taste of any citrus fruit. My wife dislikes anise or black licorice flavors and there are few tastes I like better. For all that we humans are very, very similar to each other in many ways, we also have these quirks of difference that make us interesting. Perhaps my way of relating is like this.


I love deeply where I love. I bestow my affection not easily but thoroughly. I am kind much of the time. I care deeply about the suffering of others. My heart soars in the presence of compassion, openheartedness, altruism and generosity. I am passionately devoted to the Dharma and other philosophies that emphasize kindness and love. I give of myself where I can. I am loved. This is enough; it is enough.