It occurs to me…

I read this today from Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart:

“We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong….  It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to make us feel better.  Blame others.  Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft and open and tender in ourselves  Rather than own pain we scramble to find some comfortable ground.”

In the pinball machine that is my mind, this sent me immediately to a song I had not listened to in a while – Jesus Was a Capricorn, by Kris Kristofferson, which includes this unfortunately timely rendition (though the song is nearly fifty years old) of (at least in my mind) this same concept Chodron was discussing.

“Some folks hate the whites, who hate the blacks, who hate the klan

Most of us hate anything that we don’t understand

“Cause everybody’s got have something to look down on

Who they can feel better than at anything they please

Someone doing something dirty decent folks can frown on

If you can find nobody else, then help yourself to me.”

There they are, blame and looking down on others – two tried and true, imperfect, even hideous methods to make myself feel better.  UGH!

Always sound advice from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata that seems to fit every day:

“Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence.”

Dusting off this piece of writing by John Donne, contemplating how fresh and relevant it is 400+ years later:

 

No man is an island, entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,

as well as if a manor of they friend’s or thine own were:

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.”

In these times, what bell am I hearing in the distance, in my community, in my inner circle?  What does it have to do with me?  How do I respond?

“This world is a great sculptor’s shop.  We are statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis

Now that throws a wrench into the works.  Here I’ve been going around, hammer and chisel in hand, thinking I was the sculptor in the shop!

Photo taken in Malibu last year.

Steve Goodman’s song Videotape came up on my playlist and I fell for it again; found out the words had mostly stuck with me:

If your life was on videotape, wouldn’t everything be alright

When your head hurt the morning after, you could roll it back to late last night

You could replay all of the good parts, and cut out what you don’t like

Wouldn’t you be in great shape, if your life was on video tape

Goodman notes in later verses that this is fantasy.  He doesn’t have ESP, a crystal ball, or even a video recorder.  He can’t predict the future or change the past.  None of us can.  (That is, we never had the other things, and in 2020, don’t have video recorders.)

All the more reason, it occurs to me, to be mindful and live in the present.

More from Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart:

“When everything falls apart and we feel uncertainty, disappointment, shock, embarrassment, what’s left is a mind that is clear, unbiased, and fresh.  But we don’t see that.  Instead we feel the queasiness and uncertainty of being in no-man’s land and enlarge the feeling and march it down the street with banners that proclaim how bad everything is.”

She forgot to mention Drum Major, that guy in front of the banner, the one wearing that ridiculously high hat and waving that big baton.  That is often me!

Ironically, I guess, I got a laugh today out of my reading from Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart.  She notes that when things fall apart, one tendency is to try to recreate ourselves.  That is, rather than settle in with the conflict and try to learn something about ourselves in the struggle, we decide to recreate ourselves “as if we were Michelangelo chiseling ourselves out of marble.”  Chodron incites the laugh with the observation that: “Just as we are on the verge of really understanding something, allowing our heart to truly open, just as we have the opportunity to see clearly, we put on [Groucho Marx glasses] with fluffy eyebrows and a big nose.”

Indeed, in a world filled with the commercially driven theme that a “new you” (whether Groucho Marx glasses, a new hair color, car, vacation, new exercise equipment…) is only a keyboard, credit card, and same day Amazon delivery away, creating a whole new you seems temptingly so much easier than taking time to sit down with the “old you” for a while, taking stock of where things are, and contemplating just what lesson this struggle has to offer.  And conveniently, I can then blame the struggle on the prior absence of that _____ in my life – that is, until the next struggle.

So just where can I get those Groucho Marx glasses?

This hard to take in lesson today from Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart:

“[W]hat we habitually regard as obstacles are not really our enemies, but rather our friends.  What we call obstacles are really they way the world and our entire experience teach us where we’re stuck….  Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast.  But what we find…is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”

This  is the same sentiment in Rumi’s The Guest House as translated by Coleman Barker:

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be cleaning you out

for some new delight….

Be grateful for whoever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

It occurs to me that I am not sure which is stronger here – my urge to resist these thoughts or my begrudging recognition of them as truths.  Onward.