The phone rang at five thirty in the morning. My daughter had left for work maybe 10 minutes before. I leapt out of bed fearing the worst. She’d had an accident, hit a deer, ran off the icy roadway. A typical mother reaction.
I grabbed the phone from my desk, fumbled for the talk button. “You’ve been selected for a free . . .”
“You miserable son of a bitch,” I yelled, slamming the receiver down.
I may as well have said, you miserable robo-dialing machine.
Feeling foolish, I went back to bed, heart still pounding, but relieved. Then I thought, shoot. I’ve learned nothing. I’m not even close to having a handle on my emotions. If I did, I would have laughed at the automated voice, at myself. At the whole ludicrous business of telemarketers invading our space, our privacy, our REM sleep. I was in the middle of a dream that I will likely never recapture. What was it?
I had fallen asleep after reading a lovely little book called “Practicing Peace in Times of War,” by Pema Chödrön. The Buddhist nun had appeared with Bill Moyers on his PBS series “Faith and Reason,” where she seemed to espouse neither. What she had was a real sense of humor. About herself and all the rest of us.
She said she remembered reading about a peace march and a violent confrontation between the peace activists and a pro-war group:
“I thought, wait a minute, is there something wrong with this picture? Clobbering people with your peace sign?” she wrote.
In the book, she cautions: “Next time you get angry, check out your righteous indignation, your fundamentalism that supports your hatred . . . of this person, this politician, that leader, those heads of big companies.” The first time I read that, I thought, Whoa. I’m not a fundamentalist anything. I’ve gotten way past that. Well, maybe not.
The fundamentalist mind has become rigid, Chödrön says, hardened into a view. So you can justify hating someone for what they believe and say and do.
If patience is the antidote to aggression, I’m in deep doo-doo. I think I understand and practice compassion; I’m often able to feel what the other person is feeling, but patience? Not so much.
Chödrön says patience means slowing down at the moment when you’re ready to fly off. You stop talking to yourself. Oh my gosh, I talk to myself all the time. She wants me to give up my story line. What I want to say to someone I disagree with. At the same time, Chödrön says, you’re not suppressing anything. Allow yourself to feel anger and every strong emotion even if it causes you pain. Patience has a quality of honesty and fearlessness. Basically, you just hold your seat. Sitting there with that naked energy of anger is like sitting on a wild horse and seeing the pain it can cause if you react. Acting out doesn’t get rid of aggression, it increases it.
I know that one first hand. I’ve had a volatile temper since childhood. But I learned the hard way not to lose my temper with people, at least not to their face. So I channeled this energy toward computers and other things that didn’t behave as I wanted. I broke things, then I felt guilty or stupid. Sometimes I made progress, sometimes I lost ground. But nobody ever told me how to do it. Counting to 10 makes you wait, but it doesn’t allow you to feel the emotion of anger and then let it go, peacefully.
Chödrön says patience and curiosity go together. I like that. My pesky inquisitiveness led me to journalism. You wonder, she says, “Who am I at the level of my neurotic patterns?”
I’m still working on that.
In the midst of all this wondering and practicing, meditating to become fearless in the face of uncertainty, I still swear at inanities uttered by our leaders. When I’m alone with the TV and nobody can hear me, those words just pop out. Hypocrisy and pigheadedness still push my buttons.
Then I sit on my cushion and try to cross my legs. I never could assume a decent lotus. I allow myself to feel the anger and then, after awhile, I let it go. I find I can empathize with a leader who holds a position for which he is poorly equipped. If I were in his shoes, I’d be scared to death. He fights fundamentalism even as he seeks security in a fundamentalism of his own.
I give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he practices patience by staying the course even though that just fuels aggression. He may feel compassion, it just doesn’t show yet. Is he curious? I don’t know, but he may be working on that. I wish him well. I know how hard this is.
I breathe in my hot emotions, like sitting on a wild horse. I feel patience. I breathe out compassion, humor, fearlessness in uncertainty.
Am I getting it? We’ll see. But I feel so much better not swearing at the TV.