More Adjustment for Inflation

While my friend's grandson was suffering from the delusion that he could save his mother from herself, my Tibetan goddaughter fell into a terrible and very uncharacteristic funk. All the good girl effort she had put into working overtime and volunteering new programs and income means for a museum did not get her the full-time job she thought all that deserved.

Every time she would call to tell me the founder of the museum stopped to say: "I'd really hate to lose you," or somebody on her guided tour said she was the best guide ever or how she had done so much to improve the place out of her great love for it, I would quietly cringe. I was standing back far enough to see how the girlfriend convinced herself that being responsive, competent, and consistently available, not to say carefully manicured and dressed, would have to win a guy, because it would force him in turn to be that into her. I kept trying to warn her that a museum is just another bottom line business. Unless its financial handlers could see monetary profit in finding her a special job outside the extant hierarchy, which was to say get more money back than they would pay her, they had no motivation to hire her no matter how much of her heart she'd given to the place. Heart was not a PhD or MBA.

But for six months she insisted on not looking elsewhere for work, believing the museum really didn't want to lose her. She imagined the guy at the top who admired her contributions to his namesake institution would come through and rescue her, especially now that he knew how badly she needed a full time job. All she wanted was $40,000 and health insurance. But it was never offered. And when he subsequently donated another $25 million to the place with not even a penny of it earmarked for her, she exploded from the pain. "He lied to me," she said, "when he said he would hate to lose me. It's him who didn't come through."

How could I tell her it was she who lied to herself with expectations when at the moment I wasn't doing that much better at managing my own?

When my book Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking, was published in September by Wisdom Publications, I expected my life to light up like a switchboard. I expected ka--shing! I had downloaded 50 years of powerful information that would help two generations of people clueless in a kitchen, so I expected invitations to talk or cook or be interviewed for magazines. I expected agents to line up asking me what else I had to write--because this in fact happened to me decades ago after one op-ed piece in the New York Times. But all I got was silence. A vacuum. An echo chamber of disappointments. As Buddhists like to say: nothing happened.

I needed a new job as badly as my goddaughter, and had been counting on this book to be a life changing launch. The oblivion that punctured those high hopes became unbearable. I badmouthed the publisher and distributor for not doing their job and took to promotion with a demonic vengeance. But I kept hitting walls. When I couldn't even convince my local bookstore to care enough to buy more than one token copy to stuff on its shelf, I bought two books from Amazon to dent their independence.

Eventually I got over it. Being that angry was ruining even sunny days. It was a bummer being grouchy 24/7? I didn't like myself so much that I finally stepped back and looked in the mirror. What I saw there was a sick joke. I had been flogging myself with the nasty whip of my expectations--very personal expectations that nobody else in the universe knew about. Great expectations for the same sort of happily ever after my goddaughter and my friend's grandson wanted. My own idea of happily, of course. Not that anybody would know that.

In that mirror was a pathetic Dharma student, still crazy after all these years because she sometimes thinks she gets no satisfaction. Here was someone who somehow threw her Buddhist practice aside and thus forgot to remember its most important mind training sound bite: Give up all hope of fruition.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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