TURNING OFF THE ALARM

I am not one of those perky good morning America! people who wakes up with a song in her heart and bounces out of bed with high beam enthusiasm. I am more: “website contacted, waiting for a reply,” the groggy slob who smashes the alarm and drifts off, grimaces, grumbles then eventually in defiant silence staggers with a do not tread on me demeanor toward the coffee pot. My father used to say if only I went to bed earlier I’d get up easier but that logic never works for me. My first year of sleepover summer camp when I was seven and lights out was at nine, I listed my pet peeve as Reveille. My first year of being in my 50s when I overheard an early rising boyfriend make an appointment for “midmorning” I plaintively bleated: What the hell is that?

My failure to fly into action at the sound of an alarm no matter how much I’ve slept crimps my faith in the infallibility of other people’s logic. It bolsters my faith in assuming because every situation is different it’s best to operate within its parameters and make distinctions: for instance, if the sun is not up yet, I should not be either. So I have to say it hurt when one of my most favorite dharma sisters, a lovely granny who at dawn can be found on the roof of the monastery leading yoga class, described somebody as: “…well, a little chubby, slow moving… you know, the type who can’t get out of bed in the morning.”

It peeves me, this personality presumption. I read in those blaring headline stories trumpeting the habits of the rich and famous, how those envied lean and mean icons of success are all up by 5 AM, working out, working away reading stacks of newspapers, sending emails, writing briefs, hopping planes, toppling nations and doing all they can do before I can even get my eyes open. I know we stamp our approval as A list by calling these rise and shine folks Type A because A comes first and certainly if you think of life as the Kentucky Derby where everyone starts to run at the sound of Go! first is best. I tend to distinguish them as Type A because they are ambitious, aggressive, action packed. “You don’t think I work hard?” a Wall Street tycoon said. “Well last Tuesday I flew to Los Angeles at midnight, got a car at dawn, drove two hours south, checked out a company, drove an hour west, checked out an operation, drove two hours north to look at another firm, then drove back to Los Angeles where I had two meetings before getting on a a redeye back to New York.” Oh my. I think that sounds like the very sort of work hard day those ambitious, aggressive and action packed guys at Al Qaeda might have too.

I do think it’s awesome people get up and can do all this stuff. I marvel how they take charge and barrel ahead with such certainty. They exert themselves to do things that make other things come undone and have to be redone causing consequences somebody has to do something about. So there is always a lot to do. These action types create a problem, say morning mouth, but then they do the solution, say mouthwash for only $4.99 a bottle. Or they create a problem, say Iraq and then they do a solution, hogwash for only $4.99 million a toilet seat, which gets a lot of people into action to show what they can do too and so the doing goes on and on, where it stops nobody knows—except perhaps all those folks hawking apocalypse now.

Clocks came to us with the industrial revolution so we could get mechanized with the factories, so we could get productive like them. And we got mechanized with Pavlov’s response to jump up at the alarm sound like a racer jumping the gun. We mechanically race to face the day, to do something-- mostly to get out and like factories make something-- of ourselves, perhaps a famous name, by making something, perhaps money. You know: the early bird gets the firm. This is obviously why Type As are affluent while Type Zzs like me are…well, rested.

Of course Buddhism is about waking up but, blessed be Shakyamuni Buddha, it doesn’t say at what time. And Dharma doesn’t prescribe jumping up to do something as soon as you awake. I just love it that in the poignant Chenrezig prayer we are supposed to say every night for all the suffering in the world, that while the suffering particular to the animal realm is dullness and stupidity, the suffering of humans is “excessive activity and constant frustration.” This is such a comfort because its hint at non-action diminishes my worry about lying in bed in the morning to face myself before I face the world. For me, this time is kind of intimate, precious carefree time, a date on which the I you see and the me I know hold each other and drift in an amorphous current of mental events trying to get it together. We have to be ready for whatever shows because the Buddha like a good Boy Scout said you never know so be prepared.

Of course I am prepared. Just like everybody else I have my To Do list. I have in fact always had a little list of things that should not be missed, things I have to do when I do get up. It’s just that what I most need to do is to remember my To Do list, then to do it. Today usually has the same stuff on it as yesterday and the day before and before. Not just establishing world peace and curing cancer. Below them all this week I had: wax legs (the hair was long enough to be set with rollers), supermarket (the fridge was frighteningly barren), post office (down to 3 stamps). But here is what happened:

Monday as soon as I got up I found out that the youngest sister of my college friend Iris had abruptly died over the weekend, probably from an anaphylactic reaction to new medication. Iris’ Monday agenda had included making a major presentation for a fund raising event and suddenly what she had to do was tell her parents Nancy was dead, make funeral arrangements and get her own husband to fly home from a convention in San Diego. Life did a major hostile takeover of her To Do list, and she didn’t want to consult any of those early risers in her Wharton world—the sort of high action folks who madly swim laps back and forth, back and forth, aggressively accomplishing the heart rate and ambitious numbers. She wanted to talk to me, Miss tread water and drift. She said I would know what to do.

I decided Tuesday would definitely be the day to do the To Dos but I woke up with my shoulder very out of sorts. This reminded me to make an appointment to have it checked when I go to Maine and, as it happened, after the machine message about the office being closed, the doctor herself picked up because she was right there waiting for a special fax. This gave her a chance to download all her latest explorations into Buddhist meditation during a divorce and some medical crises erupting around her and we got to talking about what to do with knowledge so that it causes no harm, how to handle wisdom—talking for an hour. I had just hung up when a call came from a popular young Nepali musician I love like a son; he was between tours and wanted to come by in an hour to say hello—a rare offer I could not refuse. I started to figure how to do my To Do list around him when the phone rang and the Chinese man whose healing hands help the aches of my orthopedic system said because I sounded like I was in a lot of pain he would come at the time just after the Nepali left which is when he normally has a break to eat between patients. So you see, this kind of day, telling me the logic of my life may not be my own, certainly knocks the certainty out of me. I said: wax, food, stamps and the cosmos threw a surprise party so that instead I got wisdom, joy, compassion.

Wednesday I had to go to Berkeley for a Tibetan friend so Thursday I was ready to do but alarm went off making all those red blooded red staters get right up and at ‘em. A pile of Pakistanis living in merry old England were picked up plotting to blow away US transatlantic airlines so the John Wayne types jumped right up to do something. Within minutes we had lots and lots of action because they were certain every August vacationer trying to get on a commuter jet with suntan lotion was a suspected terrorist. Word had leaked that the Pakistani plot involved mixing benign liquids into lethal bombs on planes flying out of London, so these guys took charge and instantly declared all gels, liquids, lipstick and creams carried onto airplanes-- by people who hadn’t even heard the news--to be weapons of mass destruction. At security lines airports began mass destruction of toothpaste, eye drops, rouge and unopened bottles of drinking water.

In America people used to be innocent until proven guilty, but now the buckaroos who had to do something reversed the logic: everyone was presumed guilty, even toddlers, for all carry-on baggage and carry-on bunnies were taken away. Millions of bewildered people back from the beach or business deal boarded airplanes one step short of strip searched, carrying a single plastic bag of belongings just like perpetrators booked into prison.

Well, that Number One non-action guy the Buddha said we have this habit of trying to get rid of our suffering with action that only creates more suffering and there was the action with lights and camera. When the alarm sounds I just throw the blanket over my head; the directors of the do something derby threw a blanket ruling over everybody and their toothpaste. Israeli security, which can do action just fine, urged the more limited response of profiling—sort of operating within the parameters of the situation and making distinctions. That way kids could keep their juice boxes because, frankly, parents getting aboard an airliner with three kids really don’t have the strength for more terror. But we don’t seem to like limits and parameters, and distinctions don't always come with certainty. They make for ambiguity; they make you have to be responsible to think and thinking…well, that’s non action. That’s why so many folks whose certainty gets shattered by a funeral in the family or fire in the furnace or a current event like 9/11 flee to work: a job provides something to do, the appearance of action. It makes a person feel solid again, certain, can-do. Sometimes I think that’s why when the alarm goes off, people who can’t face themselves—all that juicy human ambiguity, limitation and unknown-- leap out of bed like passengers bailing off Titanic

Dr. Bonnie and I talked about how wisdom and compassion are the eyes that see what’s happening but they’re kind of stuck without legs for action. Those legs are skillful means, upaya sometimes translated from Sanskrit as power, and they are seriously hard to come by because being skillful means acting to cut suffering without creating more of it.

Friday His Eminence Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche talked in public about such means for the alchemy of turning our ripped, dirty fearful selves into bright useful gold. There are three things on the To Do list. The hardest is not to get stirred up and stir things up, inevitably for the worse. All these schools of thought are passing by in our minds and suddenly, like a fish going for the bait hook, we get caught on one of them, just one of them. Here a thought there a thought everywhere a thought thought. We hook onto one of the passing millions, grab on for the certainty of having something to hold onto and cling afraid to let go, creating a huge lethal whirlpool as we flail. We hear a nihilistic cabal plotting to turn liquids into terror and get hooked on the thought: liquids are terrifying. So we terrorize and torture normal people trying to fly on an airplane, blow up the economic future of our airlines, take Teddy bears from the hands of babies and the funniest part is this new thought on Saturday morning that all these weapons of mass destruction collected on Thursday and Friday, all the water and wine and lipstick, should be donated to charity because who wants to throw away perfectly good stuff?

The second thing to do is want to actively engage in the conversion process by applying antidotes and the third which is far and away the easiest is simply to wish that everybody can do this. You know: like all those Miss America’s, it’s to make the aspiration for world peace. Khyentse Rinpoche talked about supply and demand: the demand for peace seems to greatly exceed the supply these days so we need to get a little supply side economy going, need to get out there and produce peace.

Now as it happens, on Thursday when I was taking off with my To Do list, I got one of those internet emails that spins around, this one purporting to be an old Chinese proverb about how money can buy a mattress but not rest, a clock but not time, a book but not wisdom. I started thinking: it also can’t buy the leisure to lie in bed doing nothing but getting to be with myself. This is something I can do. This is why I will never be Type A. If there is any Buddhist thought to hold onto it is: peace begins in your own mind. Not getting hooked on somebody’s thought, not stirring things up that should be left to settle, not blaming someone else for a loved one’s death, not being afraid you can’t do your agenda. It’s only when you truly know what peace feels like that you can start to spread it around. Alarms are wake-up calls even when it’s not morning in America. When they sound, I figure you can respond with the jump into action or you can stay still—not adding to the confusion, panic, disturbance of the peace-- until you are awake enough to know just what to do.





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