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.

Observations

Things rattle around in my head sometimes. (I'm hoping I am not unique in this). Absurdities and oddities from the human experience that refuse to go away. Here's a few:

? Isn't the moral of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that it's OK to revile and exclude someone who is different until you have a use for them, when it becomes acceptable to love them? Is Rudolph, then, the archetype of the undocumented worker? You know, as in the bigots who say, "Can't stand those wetbacks...except Juan, who takes such good care of my roses. Oh, and Maria, who cares for our children. I LOVE them." A further question: shouldn't Rudolph have told Santa where to put his fogbound sleigh? Founded Occupy North Pole? The Rights of the Red? For that matter, Santa's been doing this for a couple of centuries and he still hasn't figured out how to fly in fog, for Christmas' sake?

? I drive rental cars quite often and wonder why in the world they always give us two keys on a ring that can't be opened. Isn't the whole point of having two keys to put one in your pocket in case you lock the other key in the trunk or something? What could possibly be the point of conjoined keys?

? While we're on the subject of rental cars: why do the buttons and switches have to be so different from one car to the other? I have to spend an inordinate amount of time finding out how to operate cruise control, stereo, turn signals, heating and cooling. And the different places they put the plug-in jack for connecting my mp3 player to the car stereo is just intentionally cruel, sadistic, even. Can't we just decide and all do it the same way? While they're at it, could they just put the freaking fuel door on the same side of all cars and make them all open the same way? And, hey, what's up with some cars keeping the radio on after I take the key out of the ignition (until I open the car door)? When I say OFF, car, I mean OFF.

? One more on this theme: when I get into a rental car, it is almost always evident that the side-view mirrors have been adjusted to look behind the car. Folks, side-view mirrors (stay with me here) are for looking at the side of the car in order to see things in your blind spots. If you adjust them to be supplemental rear-view mirrors, it defeats their entire purpose.

? Is tetherball the dumbest of all possible games?

? Doesn't it seem that there are far too many talented engineers with too much time on their hands? I give you as Exhibit One those cheap wind-up toys that do fairly amazing things. I had one little car that went forward a foot or so, then a lever emerged from the bottom of the car, turned it all the way over, at which point the car continued on its way. And the engineering implied by those wind-ups that do a backflip, land on their feet, then do it again is mind-boggling  Another example: someone figured out that plastic drinking glasses, when stacked, have a tendency to stick together, so they put a little flange inside the glass about 4/5 of the way down, to keep them apart but still stacked. One more: in a little lunch box thingy I got a folding plastic fork. I know it doesn't sound like much, but a close look at this thing (which had to be cheap enough to mass produce) reveals astounding miniature engineering.

? Since we're basically made of seawater (our blood has the same salinity as the ocean), why can't salt water quench our thirst? For that matter, why hasn't a species intelligent enough to put a powerful computer in every phone figured out a cheap, efficient way to desalinate sea water?

? Nothing drives me as crazy as things that are designed to do only one thing and do them badly. The most glaring example is coffee carafes. They are for pouring coffee into cups but invariably pour a substantial portion on the counter and/or floor. Here's another one: return slips that don't fit return envelopes, like the slip you are supposed to return with your check to pay a bill. Now, this may seem petty, but consider that the company that made these made and sold them as a compatible set, meaning they must have either known they didn't fit one another or were too stupid to come to that conclusion.

? Around here I quite often see signs that say, "Illegal Trespass Prohibited". This drives me nuts. Trespass is by definition both illegal and prohibited. All illegal acts are prohibited. Does anyone really think that saying it three times will deter anyone?

? What is it with people who won't take their right-of-way at four way stops and other places? Do they really think this is considerate or kind? Folks, the most considerate, kind, intelligent thing you can do is to take the right-of-way the situation offers you and do so briskly. When you foil expectation in these situations, you only make the whole exchange more frustrating and dangerous.

? It bugs me that machines like microwaves, stereos, computers and cars display messages like "Hello!" and "Bye" and "Your Meal Is Ready". It's not so much that it creeps me out (which it does, a little), but do the designers really think this makes the whole experience more evocative? I don't require a warm personal relationship with my toaster oven. I require toast.

? Why do some people use motion detector car alarms on busy urban streets? Hello! Yes, every bus and truck that goes by will set off your alarm. Get a clue.

? I have stopped watching some popular comedy shows (eg, The Simpsons, Seinfeld) because I thought their humor had become mean-spirited. Yet I have no problem watching programs (eg, The Wire, Breaking Bad) in which murder and mayhem are common plot devices. I guess I don't mind if you shoot each other in the head as long as you aren't mean about it. Nice.

? As I get older, the term "absent-minded" takes on a more sinister and literal meaning. I mean, sometimes the sucker is just...gone!

OK, I know, not exactly Earth-shattering, but don't you sometimes just stop in your tracks and say, "What were they thinking?!" or, perhaps, "What was I thinking?!" I do.

Empathy for the shooters

On Thursday I was angry, disappointed, fearful and frustrated. My bosses were talking about taking away some of my Fridays off, a schedule I have had for 12 years and around which I have organized my life. Still, weighing some days off against the death of a room full of six-year-olds makes what I was experiencing infinitesimal. But to me it was a very real and present pain and caused me deep suffering, if only briefly.

I bring this up only in order to open my heart to those who suffer mightily every day and for years upon years. Take my pain and multiply it by ten and fill an entire life with it; only then would I have any clue to what could drive a young man to take up an assault rifle and shoot little children. This act is so far in violation of everything we as human beings stand for that we must believe that only an entire disconnection from one's humanness could make it possible. What suffering, what inner and outer torture, what pain, confusion and rage must have been present in Adam Lanza's mind for him to contemplate the deed, nonetheless act on it. Not only is the mass killing of others unthinkable to most of us, but the pure innocence of children this age brings the meaninglessness of it into even sharper focus.

But here we must pull ourselves up sharply. It is far too easy to disassociate ourselves from Adam Lanza, to make of him a monster with no relation to us. This is the very impulse, the creation of Us versus Them, that keeps certain people and even whole swaths of people out of our hearts. I find myself vilifying "gun nuts" and the NRA, thinking of them as monolithic entities rather than as convocations of like-minded human beings. I find it far too easy to assign blame; to Lanza, his mother, those who missed his mental illness, a society which didn't treat it, those who use the Second Amendment as an excuse to own the means to kill hundreds of their fellow humans. I, too, have the knee-jerk impulse to lock down every school, arm every teacher, put sharpshooters on the roofs. I have the desire to take away from every person in the world their guns and other weapons. I want, in other words, to do anything but feel that Adam Lanza was me. He was and is each of us. To think otherwise is to let ourselves off the hook. We are responsible. For one thing, to deny this association is to claim that we never feel a murderous rage, even rarely and briefly. Where we fail to empathize we cannot help but fail to understand.

I know there are those who will excoriate me for suggesting that we should in any way feel badly for someone who would murder children, that I am somehow condoning the act or aligning myself with who he is. This is an odd perspective which would seem to argue that hatred is the only moral response to a hateful act, that finding someone to blame or placing Those People beyond the reach of being full members of the human race is an effective response to our confusion and pain. Part of the punishment for a heinous act is to be utterly reviled and to fill my heart with contempt and venom.

The Buddha was unambiguous in his renunciation of the impulse to divide ourselves. We are one. We are so thoroughly interdependent that not one of us could exist without the efforts of us all. The post-apocalyptic stories of the lone man or woman making a go of it on this Earth are simply silly fantasies, not to mention the fact that without bacteria, bugs, rodents and other creatures we wouldn't be here. With every breath we take, oxygen molecules that have been in and out of billions of other beings and forms enter our lungs. The stuff which makes our bodies has been stars, Rottweilers and bacon. The border between us is artificial, porous, a chimera, without substance or form in the real world.

It is only useful to see into the hearts of those who suffer and cause suffering. Or, more precisely, it is only useful to see into the Heart that is the center of us all. The more I inveigh against the NRA or those who sell assault weapons without recognizing their connection to me, the more I encourage the very divisiveness that drives someone like Adam to abandon his humanity to rage and revenge, encourage the deep-seated fear at the center of the impulse to stockpile weapons to defend against unknown terrors. I am these people. They are me. Only beginning there can we even begin to understand.

Don't get me wrong. I oppose the private ownership of most weapons. As I am devoted to the Dharma, I am philosophically opposed even to the use of guns for hunting. (In response to those who say that deer and other animals must be thinned to avoid their becoming a nuisance, I recall the Gary Larson cartoon with two deer speaking, one saying to the other, "Why don't they thin their own damn herd?"). At a minimum, if suddenly in charge of the world, I would ban assault weapons and handguns (the latter designed for the sole purpose of killing other people), except for the military and police. If we must have them, how about gun clubs, where guns for hunting and target practice are kept in a central location and locked up, only to be accessed for licensed, planned activities, then locked up again? (And, if the end times come, where the militias would know where to find them, just to reassure that faction).

I would ban first-person shooter video games. Yes, yes, I too have seen the studies denying a link from these games to gun violence in the real world. But should we really be breaking down the moral horror that (one would hope) comes over us at the prospect of pointing a gun at another human being and pulling the trigger? Would we condone a video game in which we practiced the fine points of rape? When I visited them a few years ago, I was horrified to see my sweet greatnieces and -nephews calmly mowing down bad guys with assault rifles. This sort of game also reinforces the divide between Us and Them. When we depersonalize those we view as Other, it becomes much simpler to take them out without qualm. Think of the degrading epithets used to describe our opponents in war: gooks, krauts, japs, towel-heads, filth, Charlie. If we downgrade them from fully human to something less, we need not feel quite the same dismay when we end their lives. We may, in fact, feel that we are doing our holy duty by killing the Other, much as the Nazis did the Jews and others they demeaned. I read of the recent shootings in Pennsylvania on Yahoo and was more devastated by the comments on the article than the article itself. These mostly centered in "now the state will come for your guns, be ready to kill them" and, most chilling of all, "You are next". We have hammered out ideological bulwarks and are hunkering down behind them for the long fight. This can only lead to more and worse violence.

The Buddha's message was clear: it is the creation of suffering to leave any person or any creature whatsoever out of your heart. It is the source of personal suffering, societal suffering, the suffering of the whole world. In fact, there is no other source; this is the wellspring of all suffering. We can choose, instead, to turn to the wellspring of all that is good, the understanding that we are all one--the deer and the hunter, the NRA vice president and the pacifist, the shooter and the shot. Adam Lanza is that cute six-year-old girl he killed and she is he. It cannot be otherwise because it is the core truth of our existence. There is no other place to begin to heal and transform our world into one of love, harmony and understanding. This is possible. It is never too late to begin. 

Anxiety

Let me reassure you right away that I am not about to launch into some autoanalytical diatribe like last week's. But anxiety does have me curious.

Right now it is Thursday morning, December 13. This evening I will fly to Sacramento to visit my family. I do this every month, mostly because my parents are aging and I want to be a vital part of their last years, but also because I don't want to become an afterthought to the rest of my family, most of whom live in that area. (You would have to ask my siblings if "not being an afterthought" equates to being a pain in the ass). And this morning I am anxious. In fact, I have been low-level cranky all week. But here's the thing: I love flying. I love being with my family. I've developed a cautious affection for Auburn, where I spend most of my time. My brother and his wife, son and dogs graciously welcome me into their home. Things generally go smoothly. And so on. So...whence the anxiety?

I don't wish to equate this kind of anxiety with the crippling condition from which some unfortunate folks suffer; this is nothing like that. But my anxious feelings do seem to transform me into a different person. My resolves and disciplines (food, behavior, attitude, demeanor, meditation, kindness above all) seem to fade into the background as this ravenous desire to be comforted takes hold.

What makes me curious is not the anxiety per se; that's actually pretty mundane. What I marvel at is how malleable is this thing we call personality. How can something so routine cause me not only to feel these symptoms but to feel that I have been, no matter how temporarily and, in the end, insignificantly yet nonetheless truly transformed?

By Thursday evening, on the train on the way to the airport, a calm, warm, benign feeling overcomes me. All is well.

Throughout this trip (I'm writing this having now returned) I noted my feeling states and couldn't help but be aware that I go through a similar cascade on every trip: I seem to become annoyed at pretty close to the same time, get the feeling that everything is just as it should be right on cue, and so on. Because my monthly trips are so much the same (fly in Thursday evening, stay Friday and Saturday, home Sunday morning), and the things I do on those days are almost as predictable, it makes for an interesting Petri dish, a replicable pattern in which to see who I am, who I become at each stop. As I mentioned above, it really does feel as if this is not just a shift of mood but an entire transformation.

Which is just what the Buddha would have predicted, actually. The delusion is that we are ever some sort of constant and invariable being. We shift and change and respond to events. The risk of thinking of ourselves as permanent manifestations is that we will exacerbate suffering (ours and that of others) by trying to make it so, attempt to nail down the person we are and keep it that way. When I thought of myself this weekend as a creature in flux and that there was nothing in particular I needed to do in response, I suffered less. I also felt much less of a need to act out my discomfort with food or other actions. Just in the simple noticing of the fact of my anxiety, I also found its antidote, just as the Buddha said I would. Smart guy, that Buddha, eh?

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.