IOU

I have no delusion that Phillip Seymour Hoffman owed me anything. He didn't know me, nor I him. We weren't friends. Still...

Art is a contract, isn't it? We both (creator and consumer) invest something in the exchange and expect something in return. That seems only fair. Without my emotional investment, the roles Hoffman played would be meaningless to me. And without a similar investment by thousands of others, he wouldn't have been able to do what he did at all, because there wouldn't have been an audience for it.

Don't get me wrong, I think the guy had every right to be a junkie if he wanted. He had the right to take his own life, too, if the overdose was intentional (though I choose to think it was not). But still there is an anger in me that he left so soon, that what I gave, though a minuscule part of the whole, was so lightly regarded that he could die before his time. That perspective feels a bit bizarre even to me, but I think it's a valid one.

Not taking care to stay here for us is a breach of faith, it seems to me. Now, retiring from the scene (as in Grace Kelly, for instance, or J.D. Salinger) is a different matter—they and others like them decide for whatever reason that they are through with serving up what we want. But to exit inadvertently or with malice, either one, is to rip apart that bond between us, no matter how tenuous it might be.

David Foster Wallace

Do you hear that, Marilyn? John Belushi, are you listening? David Foster Wallace, you prick, did you hear what I said? Does this ring a bell, Heath? C'mon, Kurt, did you really have to put that gun in your mouth? James Gandolfini, Andy Kaufman, Whitney Houston, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Judy Garland, Jimi, Janice, oh the list goes on and on. It is so sad. I feel so deprived.

And I feel a bit of a cheat, too. What business do I have to still be alive when The Big Bopper died so young?

Yet, we carry on. The world goes round. We celebrate who they were and listen, watch, and read what they did. We hold them in our hearts. We hope they are at peace. We wish them well on the journey. We go on.

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.

Angry Man

I had another experience with anger the other day. In one way, I am very glad this has become enough of a rarity that this fact is worth noting. This has not always been so. Anger can also be a valuable teaching tool, when I allow it to be. But it takes me several days before I can get over the recrimination and blame I feel whenever I am angry.

This itself is worth exploring. Anger is not who I am, but when it happens, I feel as if I have truly done something awful, something irreparable. Now, while I don't wish to encourage anger, I find it odd that something in my experience has led to a feeling of self-loathing when anger arises. It feels much like the conditioning young Alex underwent in A Clockwork Orange, which caused him to become debilitated by nausea and cramping whenever he contemplated violence. In that case, it was clear the conditioning was itself an evil thing, regardless of what Alex may have done (and he did plenty) to earn the enmity of society. Just so, without condoning my outbursts, I need to find a way to regard my anger as a natural extension of who I am, who I have been, and the experiences I have encountered in my life and (who knows?) perhaps many lives.

Part of the disapprobation I feel is made up of societal expectations. In many circles (unless you are a character on television or in film), any level of expressed  anger is entirely unacceptable. It seems to be considered manifestly unsafe. I am beginning to question whether or not this absolute prohibition is wise. Not that I am arguing for anger as a constructive force; generally speaking, by its very nature it is destructive. But when we look at it as an expression of generations upon generations of accumulated assumptions about the world, assumptions about  fairness and justice and reasonability, perhaps we can begin to consider anger more in  the light of a common emotional state than a problem. Could there possibly be the same acceptance and constructive engagement around anger that there currently is around, say, depression and anxiety? Could we come to recognize  that it, too, just like these other emotions, comes at least in part from a learned and possibly dysfunctional way of viewing the world? Especially since, it seems to me, a good part of anger comes from depression, anxiety and fear.

Not that I am asking  for special treatment, but if I am to have compassion for my anger, it would be helpful if those around me had compassion for it, too. In this most recent incarnation of my anger, which was work-related (these days, my anger is almost always about something at work), though I didn't anticipate the outcome to be this extreme, in my imagination I thought about what I might say if it came before someone from human resources. I thought quite seriously about claiming an emotional  accommodation. Once again, this would not excuse the behavior associated with it (though this was, in fact, rather mild), but would take into consideration this emotional predisposition with which I struggle. In the final analysis, once I have gotten over castigating myself, it does feel a bit like a prejudicial act to assume that my emotional states are the result of bad motives, while those of other emotionally challenged people are thought of in a more lenient light.

It  just so happened that the dharma talk I was listening to soon after this encounter with anger was one by Joseph Goldstein on what is known in Buddhist circles as aversion. The basic deal is this: there are three broad categories of mind states which stand in the way of one's ability to practice the Buddha's teachings. These are known as kilesas. This Pali word is usually translated as "defilements". That sounds  a little extreme, until we consider that what the Buddha taught was "purification" of mind states. Thus, much like the processing of raw ore into precious metals, wherein the dirt and detritus must be removed  in order to get at the pure treasure, when the defilements are present we cannot hear the dharma as well as we might otherwise. And without this clarity of understanding, we can never reach the ultimate state of nirvana.

In the Buddhist cosmology, the kilesas are craving, aversion, and ignorance. Anger is a form of aversion (though, it seems clear, it incorporates elements of the other two, as well). So it was particularly telling to encounter a talk on aversion just as I was contemplating my own aversive behavior. At one point, Joseph quotes Carl Jung as having said, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular." I would add that making the darkness visible is also not socially acceptable, which increases the difficulty. Nonetheless, the Buddha also referred to anger as that which has a honeyed tip and a poisoned root. This is especially true of self-righteous anger. It  feels so good to rip into someone who is clearly in the wrong that it can be some time before the high of the anger passes sufficiently for us to realize that even under such circumstances, our anger is not useful.

In accord with the dharma teachings, Joseph suggests four responses to aversion: mindfulness, investigation, wise reflection and, if all else fails, inattention to the subject of our aversion. Note that none of these approaches involve blame, shame, or rejection. In fact, he quotes the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh that in response to anger, "we don't suppress it, we don't run away from it, we just breathe and hold our anger in our arms with utmost tenderness. The anger is no longer alone." He goes on to recommend staying with it because eventually "mindfulness particles will infiltrate the anger"  and "if you keep shining your compassion and understanding on it, your anger will soon crack and you will be able to look into its depths and see its roots."

Thus, despite my characterization earlier, anger is not necessarily a destructive force. It can be a force for good if contemplated with gentleness and care. This will  take some work on my part. Even more deeply than the sources of my anger seem to be the predisposition to shame and remorse associated with its expression. For me, these seem to follow as naturally as night follows day. This is not all bad (I would hate to feel that there was no need for restraint in expression of my anger, for instance), but I need to cultivate a pause in there, to consider what my anger has to teach me about being a compassionate, caring, loving human being. No matter how it is looked upon by my boss or you or anyone else, there is no part of me that is unworthy, that must be rejected out of hand. I can, as Thich Nhat Hanh said, hold my anger with love. And in so doing I can hold yours, too.

Namaste.

Anatomy of anger

I had the opportunity last week to observe closely the workings of anger in me. It is very like what I imagine would be the movement of poison in my body. I mean this not as an analogy, but quite literally. Prior to the anger I was feeling clear and peaceful, so the change was that much more evident. When the anger descended on me it changed (as it seemed) my whole world.

The what and who and why of this anger doesn't much matter, nor does its justification or lack thereof. Have you noticed this? Anger is an indiscriminate toxin and has the same effect no matter how holy or unholy the triggering event.

Someone did something, then, and I reacted. I felt the surge of my righteous indignation first, and this always feels so reassuring, so powerful. I spend much of my life feeling either neutral or powerless (might as well admit it), that this adrenalin rush feels like a revelation. But it doesn't last.

Then comes that sickening feeling of the aftermath of the rush, the anger hangover which, like an actual hangover, lasts far longer than the pleasure. It is a physical as well as a psychic phenomenon, a nausea, an exhaustion, a sensation something akin to the bodily response to grief. And I know, after all, what the grief is for: I wish to be a better person than this, and have wished so for as long as I can remember. I grieve that I'm not.

And I craved. I craved sugar and warm milk and comfort and reassurance. I craved certainty and power and love and appreciation. I craved escape and clarity and unchallenged correctness. I craved fat and salt and gooeyness. I craved a solution that would make it all right.

A powerful drug, this anger.

Then it passed as if it had never been. It left a bit of destruction in its wake, though thankfully nothing like the wreckage my anger used to create. What had seemed so real and important now appeared to be a mere mirage.

I am reminded that anger is fear. I suspect there are instances where this is not so, but I have yet to come up with any. And this anger was most certainly fear. And what is the antidote to fear? Not courage, I think, though that certainly helps. I think the antidote to fear must be compassion. When I am living in my fear, my heart is closed, in a defensive crouch. If I can open my heart to the source of my fear--if only a little--the feelings dissipate and I can begin to see what I feared as the chimera it is. It is enough.

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."

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.