Who Are They Talking To?

I sometimes get students who react badly to just about anything I do or say in class. Even if I ask them an innocuous question (“Howya doin’?”), they snap. They believe that I’m probing for information to be used against them. I understand that they are not really glaring at me. Their hostility is directed at someone who resembles me. Or they’ve made assumptions based on my age and appearance. I look like I fit into a category of people they fear and despise.

I’ve learned to give edgy students space and distance, to interact only when necessary. However, their guards remain up, so they carefully watch me giving personalized instruction. They usually make one of two choices after seeing classmates’ work improve. A hostile student may gradually relax after realizing that I mean no harm, that I’m there to help. They tentatively accept input. Or a hostile student might decide that I’m playing favorites. I’m nice to some students but not to him or her.

Several years ago, one student would lunge forward to cover her drawing whenever I came near. I saw that she dreaded my feedback, so I moved on. One day as I passed by, she complained to another student that I never gave her instruction. I retraced my steps and told her that I simply respected the cues she had given me, that I’d happily tell her what I thought if she’d let me see her work. The student stared at me for a few seconds, then turned away. She couldn’t process the news that her attitude had dictated my responses. Her behavior didn’t change. She still covered her drawings whenever I came around.

On the other hand, I’ve noticed that people see me more accurately when I’m present in the moment. When my mind is relatively clear, folks look me in the eye and sometimes smile. I’ve consequently begun to wonder whether hostile students are reacting to more than their preconceived biases. Instead, they might be responding to my mental energy. They sense stormy weather regardless of my external actions.

If, for example, I’m brooding about some past injustice, anger and resentment ooze into the space around me. Instead of misinterpreting my intentions, sensitive hostiles might be responding to subtle signals.

If I engage them in the present moment, then the directness of the interaction weakens their preconceived notions. An open attitude encourages openness.

Keeping Score

I sometimes tell my students to do a walk-around, to circle the room and look at other student drawings. I say, “Don’t compare your work to someone else’s. Don’t worry whether Bob or Ted or Alice drew better or worse than you did. The point of this is to steal from each other. If you see something great in a drawing, then use that idea or technique in your next drawing…And then claim that you thought it up yourself. That’s what Picasso did…It’s the Artist’s Way.”

I tell that joke to get them to relax. Then they can learn from each other while avoiding the trap of making competitive comparisons. If they focus on the drawings, they share the benefits of taking a group class. If they turn each other into markers of success and failure, then they lose the opportunity to see clearly and learn.

One of my relatives makes her life miserable by making constant comparisons. She feels superior when acquaintances, friends, and family members suffer setbacks and failures. She enjoys a good downfall but gets jealous and resentful when she sees other people feeling happy, functioning well, and gaining success. She believes that achievers work hard and make good choices in an effort to outshine her. And if they stray across her path, she makes cutting remarks to undermine their self-confidence and to ruin their good moods. If she isn’t happy, then no one else should be.

I’ve noticed this tendency in other people too, though most don’t develop this attitude to such a malignant extent. They forget that we are interdependent and interconnected. They see life as a competition that divides folks into the groups of winners and losers. When I make this mistake, I earn the punishment of pointless misery. Suffering increases in direct proportion to the number of times I turn people into markers of success and failure.

One antidote to this malady is to do a personal walk-around. If I look at the best and worst moments of my life, then I might find a pattern. What makes me happy and content? What leads to pain and frustration?

My best memories are tied to moments of connection. I felt more alive when I turned down the noise in my head (resentments, jealousy, etc.) and immersed myself in the present moment. Then I melted as I received a loving look and embrace. Then I lost track of time while working on a painting or walking in the woods. Then I felt the happiness of others radiate outward to include me.

Whenever I stopped keeping score, I enjoyed the game a whole lot more.

(Non) Accidents of Birth

Most teenagers wonder, at some point, how they ended up born into their families. They feel like a fateful god shrugged its shoulders and made a random selection. Bob Jr. might have inherited a few traits from mom and dad, and he might resemble a sibling, but everything else feels wrong.

I’m a recovering NDE video addict. The predominant message given by Near Death Experience survivors is that God is a being of infinite love and wisdom. The second recurring message is that we choose the broad outlines of our lives before birth. We come into this world with things to do and lessons to learn. We select hard times and tough circumstances. We pick our relatives. Like masochistic tourists, we plan the most challenging routes.

I have one question when I consider the proposition that I volunteered for everything: what the hell was I thinking? Other questions: did folks living in abject poverty, suffering starvation, and ricocheting from one moment of abject terror to another really choose the courses of their lives? What induced them to pick those travel plans? Were all the cabins on the luxury yachts already taken?

I’ve heard that we need hard times and tragedies to appreciate the best things in our lives. Moments of happiness seem sweeter when contrasted to times of grief and pain. I sometimes tell painting students that compositions need to have patches of dull colors to make the shining passages shine a little brighter.

But don’t we all wish that our lives resembled extended beach vacations?

Near the end of earning my master’s degree, an acutely stressful time, an acquaintance commented that I had grown a lot during the preceding two years. She wished me continued growth postgraduation. I groused, “If that’s what it takes to grow, I’d like to spend the next two years quietly rotting.”

But I’ve recently come across some teachings that assert that radical acceptance reduces suffering. Regardless of our situations, the best we can do is to embrace each moment and live it fully. The Roman Stoics had a slogan: amor fati. Love your fate.

We may never fully understand the reasons for tragedies and heart wrenching struggles in our lives. But bitching about them makes everything worse. Yearning for different circumstances or wishing that we could go back and make different choices wastes time and energy. If we turn and face our experience, then we are freed from struggling against things that can’t be changed. And we truly live our allotted time.

If the only sure gift we have is this life, then why not make use of it to the furthest extent? Questions about a life plan’s worth can be saved for the exit interview.

Noise, Noise, Noise, Noise

Psychological investigators asked individuals in a test group to make a choice: would they rather spend twenty minutes in an isolation room using no electronic devices, or would they opt to break the tedium by giving themselves short but painful electrical shocks. Many chose to press the shock button. The thought of being quietly alone with their thoughts terrified them.

Addiction to media stimulation isn’t new. When I was a kid, my mother turned the television or radio on shortly after breakfast. They remained on for the rest of the day and into the night. (We listened to Walter Cronkite reporting Vietnam War body counts during supper.) She fell asleep many nights on the living room sofa accompanied by late night talk show hosts. At the height of her enthrallment, she would simultaneously watch a baseball game on TV, listen to the same game on a transistor radio, and would also have another radio playing an AM station. If you rotated focus from one to the other, you could hear TV commentators murmuring, the radio sportscasters making similar remarks about a play at second base, and the AM radio crooning its slogan (“It’s Beeeyoootiful in Dayton.”) And if the game lacked drama, Mom would engage in a conversation over the top of the noise.

I don’t remember many moments of calm and silence inside the house. I sometimes took refuge by climbing an apple tree in the back yard. I’d watch birds flying by as the sun set behind a stand of trees.

When I first started meditating, stillness troubled me. My mind churned out random thoughts, and a headache would pop up behind my forehead. I gradually grew accustomed to silence by meditating with my wife. Her steadying presence drew me deeper.

We joined the Quakers shortly after our wedding. Quakers practice a form of silent worship in which a group “centers on the Inner Light” and waits for guidance. Speakers deliver short messages when inspiration strikes. But in a “gathered meeting”, a whole hour passes by undisturbed. A feeling of kinship arises amongst the congregants, and sometimes a loving presence descends upon them.

Buddhists teach that a deeper sense of reality awaits anyone who loses their identification with mental noise. We delude ourselves when we become attached to the voices in our heads, and when we base our self-images on the ruckus. We mistakenly believe that surface waves are the whole ocean.

When I am stressed, I want noise and distraction to shield me from my situation. I escape mental pain by watching a bad movie or a long succession of YouTube videos. I can feel an addiction to noise gaining strength.

I’m slowly learning to turn toward the pain and anxiety, to meet them. I don’t want to end up wandering in an echo chamber of pointless noise.

“Why?” is the Most Useless Question.

“Why?” is the most useless question. It’s unanswerable. The questioner hopes to find reasons for outcomes and events in order to avoid a repetition of disasters. But the quest for understanding, for finding a logical sequence of causes and effects, is futile.

We can’t go back far enough to find the germ moments of catastrophes. Even if we figure out that a mad dictator’s campaign for domination derived from an abusive relationship with a bad father, why did that father act in that way toward his son? And why did that particular son react in an extreme manner while his fellow-suffering siblings maintained their sanity? Even if we blame a fatal character flaw on genetic inheritance, why did the worst elements of that inheritance get expressed at a particularly consequential moment in history? Abusive fathers and scarred sons abound. Why did a few traumatic duos cause so much carnage? In other words, Hitler, the victim of a brutal father, arrived at just the right time to do the most damage. Why?

Asking “Why” leads to the assignment of blame, but blame doesn’t fix anything. And if that question has no obvious answer, then abuse victims often assume that they caused their own suffering. (I must have disappointed Daddy. That’s why he hit me.) It feels better to take on blame rather than accept the existence of random suffering. If bad things happen to innocent people for no reason, then bad things can keep on happening whenever Fate finds new targets.

Better questions might be “What?” and “How?” What happened during a disaster? How did the various elements and agents of a situation interact to produce mayhem? What were the warning signals? What steps eased suffering effectively? How can we fix the damage?

We could look at suffering and trouble the way that weather forecasters look at storms. They describe the atmospheric situation without making judgments. They don’t get angry at hurricanes. They merely predict strengths and pathways.

Problem-solving and purposeful action begin with “What?” and “How?” Despair and self-pity coil themselves around “Why?”

Happy Sad

I made honey-ginger chicken, garlic noodles with breadcrumbs, and green beans for supper tonight. Judy enjoyed the food and thanked me. Then a thunderstorm blew in while we ate, and we heard rain falling on the skylight for the first time in about a week. Drought relief. I looked across the table at Judy and felt a deep sense of wellbeing. She knew that I had been depressed throughout the day, so I told her that I felt, at that moment, happy sad.

Events over the last two years have scraped away at my faith. I’m not sure what I believe any more but know that face value acceptance no longer works. I want to see long term proof that a theory is true and has real life applications. I lean toward skepticism anyway. So, I’m returning to my default factory mode.

All this has left a burden that I can’t seem to put down. But I still have moments when the weight lifts. I can see the goodness in my life and feel contentment.

Loss and the inevitability of change make comfort and gratitude conditional, however. I can focus on what I have and be happy. But satisfaction becomes bittersweet as soon as I recognize the impermanence of everything. I don’t really have anything that I can pin down as irrevocably mine.

There’s nothing new in that last statement. But as I get older and the losses mount, the obvious becomes blindingly obvious.

The only thing to do is to get comfortable with the fact that all things (thanks George Harrison) must pass. Life flows more smoothly when I engage in the moment. Existence becomes rich when savored. Then I can find happiness in the simple acts of cooking supper, washing a dish, and sharing a meal with Judy.

Departures

Departure, Max Beckmann, oil on canvas, 1932-33

The rush of riding “The Beast” rollercoaster begins when the car reaches the top of the first hill. I look down and see an impossibly small tunnel at the bottom of the slope. As the coaster rushes forward, I know that I’ll never survive the dread moment when flesh and metal get crushed into a compacted mass. But the tunnel magically expands as the car approaches the opening, and I safely come out on the other side. The invigorating feeling of survival lasts until the next slope approaches…

As I get older, more and more relatives, friends and acquaintances make departures. Some die. Others leave town or lose interest in maintaining a connection. My wife and I discussed the feeling that we have moved up in the queue. Sooner or a bit later, we’ll take our turn and exit this planet. We hope for further adventures on the other side but fully realize that oblivion may await us.

I’ve watched relatives and friends progress slowly toward death. Their decline into weakness, immobility, and delirium reinforced the adage that everyone loses everything by the end. They shed power, possessions, memories, and dignity as their bodies shuddered to a full stop.

As we begin our descents, we turn toward memories of times when we could climb a hill effortlessly, when others depended on us, when our minds worked clearly and efficiently. Wasted time and lost opportunities take on greater weight. Why did we engage in pointless fights and worry? Why didn’t we reach out to those who needed us? When did we let ambition trump kindness?

The trap lies in looking over our shoulders too much. If we cling to the past, wallow in loss, and indulge in adamant fatalism, then we limit our ability to go onward. We become concentrated versions of our worst, most fearful selves. Like Lot’s wife, we turn into pillars of salt.

Instead of fearing the inevitable and pining for the past, it’s better to look at each moment as a new adventure. Some adventures, of course, bring pain and exhaustion. But any journey into the unknown tops passive surrender to gloom.

If we remain open, we become like hot air balloons that have finally slipped their tethers. We float away on the wind. The final destination may be unknown, but a clear horizon beckons.