The mental transit system
I didn't need Donald Trump's campaign to know just how deadly negative thoughts the mouth fires off like darts can be. "What's on her lung is on her tongue," is how kinder people described my grandmother whose mouth was an assault rifle aimed at anybody in hearing distance. Since family was in closest range, we were her constant target and her words permanently maimed all of us one way or another. I don't think she even noticed. Asked in her mid 90s by a group of ladies who lunch how she managed to stay so sharp and strong, she shot back: "i don't keep anything in. I just let it all out." Those women thought my grandmother being a pistol was funny.
The one thing in life I did not want to be was a mental firing squad. Then, ironically, shortly after she died, I participated in a blizzardy winter 30 day group retreat where we were asked to note every time during one single day we got peeved, annoyed, or irritated. I spent that day noticing nonstop silent bitching: about having to eat tedious Oryoki style, and why didn't anybody shovel the front path because it was icy dangerous to walk? How dare someone move my shoes outside the meditation hall! Why did she push her cushion back like that and crowd me? Why didn't someone put the outside lights on since it was dark and perilous to walk out there? Nothing was right. What was wrong with these people? Didn't they know what they were supposed to do? How it should be? By evening, I was exhausted piling up evidence of my discontent and shaken to the core discovering what a full time fault finder I was. Dissatisfied with everything and everyone, I was my grandmother.
You better believe I wanted to fix that right away, but I didn't know how to not have negative thoughts. That still feels like a very advanced practice for yogis isolated in caves instead of someone struggling along the crowded sidewalks of Samsara. Maybe this is because I seem to have come into this world equipped with an acute sense of right and wrong that is always demanding to be outted. One astrologer says: "According to Capricorns, there is only a right way and a wrong way to do things and ...their way is usually right." Evidently, it's my nature to know what's best and get everybody to shape up. I must say it did make me a good investigative reporter and opinion writer, maybe even why I started this blog.
It is also unimpeachable psychological truth-- and a dead giveaway--that those perpetually disappointed by their own imperfection will be relentlessly hard on themselves, and by extension thanks to habit mercilessly critical of others.
The jolt of that retreat made me try my eyes out to stay mindful of constant irritations so I could swallow them lest somebody discover my inner Bitch. Then Rinpoche came along and gave his teaching on the mind-to-mouth information highway, the mental transit system guaranteed to deliver news of negativity. Now alerted, I began to see even if I did manage to keep my critical opinions from spilling out, they leaked into my behavior. I was impatient or grouchy, snide, stand offish or rejecting. "No thanks, I don't want to go there...or don't want to see them." As I got more adept at noticing my rejection of what was sent my way, I remembered the late Trungpa Rinpoche said boredom was simply resistance to accepting what's happening. It's a firewall that lets us refuse to participate because we don't like the scenario. What it really is, I find now, is petulance because we want something "better." We set up a huge pile of "might have beens", what we missed. O how we hurt ourselves.
Negative thoughts have so many on-ramps to the information highway, it's impossible to patrol all the snits all the time. Rinpoche was right: it's best to stop negative thinking all together.
Since I don't know how to do that, I've been trying to stop as much as possible, just to get the feel. For instance, I share a two-unit house with the nicest young family anybody could want for neighbors. Except for laundry. They don't do it and then suddenly three or four humongous containers of dirty clothes show up in front of the machines. The washer gets so stuffed to the gills, its controls blink Error. Often for days. Or the dryer is equally jam packed and nobody empties it or notices what's in there is still damp. For days. They have to start all over again. I try to do my laundry in the lulls, but I never know when the tsunami is coming. So there are times I go down with a small basket of dirty underwear and towels and want to scream: Just pay attention to your laundry and give me a chance! But I don't say a word.
In my former two-unit house, the young family downstairs monopolized the machines in the same selfish way, and while I struggled not to voice my frustration, the roommate I had to take in went ballistic. She lived by an absolutely inflexible routine that for some mysterious reason mandated laundry on Thursday from 3 to 4. While I quickly figured that out and stayed out of her way, the folks downstairs definitely didn't know, so if they had stuff in the machines at her must moment, the whole house exploded from her rage. I spent a lot of time apologizing for how absurd she was, which brought that family and me to wink and nod intimacy-- and forever stopped me from venting my own frustration with them.
What I started to do then, I do now: I take their stuff out of the machines, put my stuff in, do my wash, dry it and put their stuff back. Usually they never know. Or I bite my tongue and wait one day, leaving my basket of dirty clothes in front of the machines as a message. This resourcefulness keeps me on happy terms with my neighbors and causes at most a day's delay. Annoying but no real harm: I still have clean underwear in the drawer and towels in the closet. Just yesterday, the young woman upstairs texted me a long apologetic message whose drift was: "I know I've been doing laundry for 10 days but I am trying to create spaces for you so please tell me if it's working."
I like to think quietly adjusting my expectation and irritation is what Sylvia Boorstein calls "managing gracefully." Of course I now know those two--expectation and irritation--are joined at the hip. Give up the first and you automatically never get the second. You get nothing to grouse about. You can be sunnier.
Expectation is "should be." It's our very own handmade opinion of what's right, how things are supposed to go--essentially happily ever after. Expectations are makeup and manicure, all the past conditioning we apply to the present moment to make us happy with it, to let us own it. We travel with overweight carry-on baggage so we can style every moment. What a waste when the moment is really just sailing off into the sunset and look! here's another.
Wonder of wonders! Buddha said, when he discovered deep in our heart of hearts, every last one of us has our very own perspective on how things should be. We each have bespoke expectations. And we each expect them to be met or we go all negative. That's the art of the deal or maybe there's the rub: my "should" is not yours, neither is my must-do list. So who's right? What's wrong? Which opinions do you trust on Yelp! And what's so great about yours that it beats mine? Why do you have these opinions in the first place?
More to the Buddha's point: trying to make those once upon a time "shoulds" come true is what causes our irritation and suffering. There's the harm boomeranging back. Remember the laundry on Thursday woman? Do you wonder why she had no friends? Expectations and opinions cut possibility off at the pass. They shoot us in the foot.
We all know the sad jokes about the Jewish mother or the insufferably opinionated in-laws who have to be banished, or at least kept at bay. There's an easy way to see negativity boomeranging back to harm. When my peers got married, meddling parents were always a worry. Now we are the parents, the in-laws. Our eyesight is dimming but experience lets us see very clearly what's going on and what the outcome is likely to be. Sadly we have all discovered nobody wants their life lacquered with our opinion. Everybody prefers their own. As my cousin says: "I use the excuse of hearing. I pretend I don't hear what's being said and that way I can't jump in or even comment negatively to my son. You just have to be deaf if you want to stay included."
Nobody likes a busybody because shoulds and musts are not necessarily shared. (See Culture Wars: zealous people busily interfering with other people's lives instead of the harder work of tending the hardship of their own.) Nobody wants to be bombed by a barrage of negative opinions. I can't be my grandmother any more because now that I am fully focused, I find steering my own life hard enough to not have the energy, time or inclination to interrupt anybody else's. I can't know everything they are dealing with and factoring in. Besides, the world has radically changed. What do I know?
When I don't expect, I find I can be pleasantly surprised. Discretion is a gift that keeps giving back, even laundry time. I'm getting better at keeping my mouth shut. Of course, as Rinpoche says, negative thoughts eventually find a way out. On the phone or at lunch, we old folks tell each other all the things we don't dare tell the young, and we agree that all we can do is silently hope for the best. Our version of course.
~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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posted by Sandy Garson @ 3:01 PM
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