Category Archives: Ahimsa

A Key Distinction

 
The Devil, it is often correctly noted, is in the details.  We all have our particular weaknesses and very particular reasons we are weak exactly where and under what circumstances our weakness becomes excruciating.  I’ve been chafing for years, for reasons I’ve gone into many times, when someone simply leaves their end of a conversation to silence.  I’ve done conscious work on my reactions to this, which is about all one can do, but it’s a challenge for me even now, whenever it happens.  And we all know, it happens all the time, especially with email.  
 
I was gratified to see in the famous NY Times, in a review of books on how to deal with difficult people, that one respected author sets aside Silent and Non-responsive as one of seven supremely maddening types.   For whatever reason, that type has learned:  all I’ve got to do, motherfucker, is nothing.   Hmmmmm?  Is my humming bothering you?  Hmmmmmmmm?
 
If a friend expresses annoyance that I didn’t reply to his description of an outburst of rage he described in an email he sent, I will read the email again and reply.  Stepping neatly into the trap.  Because then, heh…. what?   I didn’t say anything.  You’re fucking crazy.  I did nothing and look how fucking mad you get!!!!  Oh my God, and you think I was enraged because I said I was enraged when I totaled my car… what a complete fucking asshole you are, Mr. Ahimsa-Boy!
 
A few distinctions occur to me and are in order.
 
In defense of people with bad tempers who don’t want to think too deeply about why they fly off the handle from time to time, or suffer, like an expatriate friend, from all sorts of painful anger-repression related physical ailments, or live joyless lives seeing no reason to do anything but continue trudging out of a sense of duty, if you don’t lose your job over your temper, is it really that big a problem?  True friends and loving family will often forgive you for an outburst of anger, bosses– not as much.
 
Also, the difference, I realize, between the rage that was directed at me (and my sister) by my abused father, at my friend by his enraged, quick to snarl and slap mother, and whatever bad treatment was meted out by other inept parents of adults we know, is that being raged at is a trauma that causes a different category of harm in the child than just being disrespected or treated thoughtlessly.   Being the object of a parent’s rage from your earliest memories?   Priceless.
 
Just ask my dad about that, though you’d need special powers to make out what his smiling skull would tell you up there in that little boneyard outside of Peekskill. If you had those special powers, the man could tell you a hell of a lot. 

Does the thought of anger make you mad?

Is the subject of anger so infuriating, threatening, hideous in itself that virtually any mention of it will, sooner or later, stop conversation?

Likewise, the subjects of apology, repentance, forgiveness.   Do these of necessity, except, among a small, select, wounded population, induce squeamishness and avoidance?

“May I play Devil’s Advocate?” she asks, and without waiting for so much as a nod says “Here’s another either/or.   Either your intensity, self-righteousness and over-sensitivity on any subject go beyond the boundaries most people consider decent, made worse by a relentless demand for response, stated or strongly implied, put people to silence, just to make it stop.  Or, if what you write is like… oh, never mind.”

What?

“You freak people out, and piss them off, when you… you know, when you act like yourself.”

Hmmmm.  Good to know.  I’ll try not to act like myself so much.

“That’s not what I mean,” she says.

Corporations are people, with feelings too, sniff, sniff, you judgmental, insensitive bastard.   Is that what you mean?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.  “I mean that you might like to think you are not an angry person any more, that you have made great progress in that area, gained important insights you’ve had the courage and persistence to act on and are just currently frustrated, discouraged and trying not to wake up and smell the napalm, but that doesn’t mean….”

Hold it right there, girlfriend.  I was in the middle of a long discussion over the roles of genetic predisposition, nurture and  conscious effort to change innate personality traits one is unhappy with.  The correspondence reached a certain point and then abruptly stopped on the other end.  Silence as loud as the other person yelling “Silence! Enough!” [1]  

I stumbled on this line in my notes last night:  “the most insidious enemy of death benefits [taking positive lessons from the lives of even difficult departed loved ones–ed.] is the pervasive assumption that personality is fixed by midlife.” source

“Maybe your correspondent believes this pervasive assumption fervently, or hopelessly, as you might say, and has proven to his own satisfaction that struggling for any kind of positive personality change is futile and is just tired of your 2,000 word meditations, your opinionated self-regarding back and forth about the importance of doing things he feels are futile at best– particularly in light of your objectively depressing circumstances and lack of prospects for changing them any time soon.  Maybe he’s doing you the kindness of not telling you he finds these attempts to justify your life particularly distasteful.   Maybe he’s protecting you by not calling you on what bullshit virtually everything you say is.”

Dad?  Is that you, you rascal?

“You will find, son, when times get tough, that I am everywhere.  But let me assure you of this: you have made progress, and if I was still alive, still enlightened by the regrets I expressed on my death bed and my wishes to have lived differently, been, in fact, more like you, I’d be very proud of you.   Proud that you continue to believe in what you feel is right, in spite of the difficulty of it, despite the deliberate and inadvertent deafness of virtually everyone you encounter these days.”  

Must be easier for you these days, to say things like that, being a skeleton.  

“Oh, I can’t tell you how much easier it is, now that I’m just bones with dirt between my smiling jaws.”

[1]  Of course, another obvious reason for the gap in this particular case is the present lack of time required to thoughtfully reply in a life I know to be particularly emotionally complicated at this moment.   This goes as well for each of the other several cases where the subject of anger has been unveiled and then left to languish a bit.  –ed

Clear Your Desk Top

There may come a time when your mind, worn tired by struggle, will sit and refuse to move forward, even an inch.

At such a time there is no harm to turning your attention away from the computer, and thoughts of inspired action, and clearing the chaos on your desk.

On Forgiveness and Sincere Apology

 
On Forgiveness and apology, their interaction and the relative power of each, I often think of an experience from decades ago as one of the best illustrations of the amazing healing power of a complete apology. 
 
It began with a comment a friend dashed off back in the age of snail mail, in response to a badly recorded guitar solo on an early Ray Charles tune (that later was retooled with new lyrics and became the gem “Hard Times”) I’d sent him on a cassette.  I’d pointed out the solo and commented that the blues solo in the jazzy setting was something I admired, was trying to learn from, or something to that effect.  My friend wrote, a phrase I remember being greatly stung by, although it has no sting anymore: “no offense, pal, but that solo was so amateurish, I thought it was you.”
 
I called him, mightily peeved, and when I read him the offending line he sounded truly aghast (might have been a good act, but it worked) and it became clear at once that he’d had no intention of saying what he appeared to have said (or at least he skillfully and immediately conveyed that impression).  He told me he understood how terrible the words sounded, that he would have taken it the same way I did.  He agreed the words as written were hurtful, told me he hadn’t intended the offense, said he was sorry.  
 
The relief was instant, and I think the empathy– that he would have felt as I did, that it wasn’t crazy of me to have been a little offended — was a key to that.   I did not have to weigh for a second whether to forgive him or not.  The insult had not been intended, or so I was convinced by his clarification, and the hurt of it disappeared immediately.  As hurt as I’d been by the artlessly phrased line, I was grateful for and instantly relieved by the apology.  I recall the immediate effect of the apology clearly to this day, decades later. 
 
It is a rare experience, the one I’ve just described, not just for me but for anyone.  People rarely apologize for anything in our In-Your-Fucking-Face, Asshole, Culture, the most common facsimile being the annoying “if-pology” (a tip of the chapeau to Harry Shearer, who may have coined the useful term): if you were offended (why not let the passive voice be used for further distance from responsibility?) then I’m sorry.   Sorry if you were pathetic enough to need my stinking apology, in other words.
 
In the case of someone who has done terrible, objectively abusive things — and waits until hours before his death more than 40 years later to utter his first acknowledgment that he probably shouldn’t have acted that way, and apologizes for the first and last time– we’re presented with a different scenario. 
 
For my own mental health I had to figure out a way not to be angry at a father who, in a fundamental way, was close to insane.  My many attempts to have a dialogue with him over the decades were roughly rebuffed.  He was so damaged that he couldn’t help but inflict the damage he did.  He was unlikely to ever acknowledge it, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have been able to on his death bed either, if I’d stood there angry at him as he was dying.
 
Fortunately for both of us, in intensive therapy not many months earlier I’d finally put the connections together to realize that, given the atrocious abuse he’d endured, he was not capable of being a more compassionate person, that his life was a tragedy, and very painful to him and that my only play was letting go of my own anger to the extent that I could.  
 
As I stood there talking to him those last couple of days of his life I was aware only of doing what I could to make his passing as easy as I could help to make it.  I repeated the phrase “if you could have done things differently you would have” every time he raised the whip over himself for what a monster he’d so often been.
 
So I’ve lived those two sides of apology/forgiveness.  A sincere apology definitely helps a person to forgive:  I hurt you, I understand why you were hurt, I didn’t mean it, I was wrong, I’m sorry, I’ll try my best not to do it again.  Please forgive me.  Easiest case.  I try my best to quickly apologize every time I’m aware I did something hurtful to someone I care about.   
 
Forgiving when the person is unrepentant– I think it can only be done when there is a strong psychic reason, like the person is a parent, or sibling, or if not forgiving will drive you mad, something like that.   And in that case one has to go through something like the same process of ‘apology’ on behalf of the other before you can forgive: he underwent traumas that made him a monster, he didn’t intend to become a monster, if he could have not been a monster he would have done it, he tortures himself for his monstrousness, etc.  Only after that series of understandings is reached can one let go of some of the pain by forgiving, it seems to me.  And forgiveness is for ourselves, primarily, if we are carrying anger in our hearts.
 
Jack Kornfield, Zen teacher, tells the one about two former prisoners of war who meet years later.    “Do you often think about our captivity?” asks one. “I think about it every day, and whenever I do I think of going back and slaughtering them all,” says the other.   “Well,” says the first,”then you are still their prisoner.”  
 
Without the acknowledgment of injury, and a sincere attempt to make it right, there is only hurt and anger in the injured party most of the time.  In the case of rough characters who are not my father, I toss them aside if they repeatedly dismiss as neurotic over-sensitivity my hurt reactions to hurtful things they do.  Don’t want to talk about it?  Fine.  Have a nice day.
 
I can really relate to the anger of people living in a fifth or tenth generation of inherited poverty that goes back to slavery and the 40 acres and a mule they were promised but never got.   This immensely wealthy nation has never really given any sort of meaningful apology to its former slaves for the obscenely profitable monstrosity of the “Peculiar Institution”.  The shameful subject is most often daintily dismissed as unfortunate ancient history, though in my lifetime lynching was still a matter of “states’ rights”.  Those who call for reparations for centuries of slave labor are thought of by most whites as grand-standing polemicists, even though economists have calculated the almost incalculable wealth created here by slave labor, on behalf of the genteel “Planters”, some of our wealthiest and most powerful families.
 
“You … er, uh, n-words, are so fucking over-sensitive, we built housing projects for you, we give you money for nothing, let you get into college with lower SAT scores, still give affirmative action to a few of you, we even conduct investigations when a police department shows a pattern of racist harassment, brutality and murder against you — what the devil more do you want from us?”  only goes so far.  And how far it goes is nowhere.
 
Sorry.

Anger– by a high school student

Anger

that shit will

fuck you up

hold you down

make you do

what it wants

you to do

Fuck!  

Are you fucking stupid?  

Fuck him up!

The soft voice

that is almost always

wiser

is drowned in the roar

of Anger

foaming at the mouth

like Hitler.

Storms pass

birds start singing

everyone gets back

to work or siesta

but while Anger

whips the crowd

like a livid Klansman

it can be easy to forget,

pitchfork or torch

in hand,

that this popping veined,

spitting motherfucker

is a Ku Klux Klansman,

is Anger.

Needs to be calmed down

not followed

screaming

into the dark night.

Being Invisible Hurts

Making one’s life’s work a project to make the children of the invisible feel visible for a few hours a week:  sheer idiocy.  I realize this, and how developing this project flows naturally from my own childhood experiences.   I was not born invisible, did not slip off until I disappeared during high school and kept out of sight, and the workforce, for a few decades.  I had great potential and was reminded of it often by many as I slipped silently into the night.  

We live in a corporate society, just accept it.  Virtually everyone I know is employed by a corporation, paid by a corporation.   The success or failure of everyone in our society is measured by their prosperity or lack of prosperity.  To dream of an unpaid program that has no measurable path toward prosperity?   Sheer idiocy.  

I do not castigate myself, or seek to belittle what I have managed to achieve so far, even as I mock myself in the voice of the larger society.  A program that allows young public school children, working together, to make all esthetic and technical decisions as they produce group animation?   Priceless, truly.  They master a host of skills and reap huge, unquantifiable benefits from this communal play with its ingenious balance of free imagining and technical demand.   Even just the isolated element of adults witnessing and applauding kids’ creativity and achievement for its own sake is invaluable.  That I lack metrics to prove this?  A fatal flaw in the design of the program, from a corporate funder’s point of view.  

I have felt in my body the pain of being invisible.  It doesn’t come from a lack of fame, or envy of celebrity, or the want of some validation.   It comes from that fundamental human need not to be seen as a fungible widget in a school uniform, a tiny data point, but as an individual containing an entire universe of imagining and potential.  The corporation does not place any value on this fundamental human need– it has no such need itself, being a legally constructed monster, a single-minded, all-consuming predator given all the natural rights of a human being.   “I’ll believe that corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one of them to death,” said Bill Moyers, national treasure.  Me too.  

A thought experiment:  consider your feelings on a subject you care about greatly. Express them as cogently as you can to a close friend.   Hear your close friend express almost zero understanding of why you feel so deeply about the subject.   Experience the existential moment where you weigh all the other good qualities of your close friend against their inability to understand your deep engagement with this subject.  This part is a conversation, largely with yourself.  

Now, experiment part 2:  express the same thing, in written form, and send it to the friend.  Hear nothing in return.   Is a neurotic person the only type who might find this silence troubling?  

The world is just the world and there is a certain wisdom, I suppose, in lowering one’s expectations about what can be done.   The myth of the individual who, by force of intellect, will, talent and determination, changes the way people think about the world?  It is seen now and again, usually in the context of people who achieve great wealth and celebrity along with their influence.  Luck is also a factor, the accident of birth first among these fortunes.  

Then we have someone like Malcolm X, pointing to another path, following one’s beliefs without thought of personal gain like recent world-changers who spring to mind, amoral corporate geniuses like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Of course, Malcolm’s fame arose while speaking for a large, ignorant movement– he stood for years before a loud megaphone where his genius could be honed and displayed regularly.  He underwent moral transformations during his life, was willing to revisit his deepest beliefs, refine his moral stance.  And he was willing, although not anxious, to die for those beliefs.  The shots that ripped him apart in the Audubon Ballroom that February day fifty years ago this week were earned by telling threatening truths many had an interest in not hearing expressed.   Several parties who hated each other were united in their desire for his death, played essential parts in his murder.   Not exactly a role model for action, perhaps, unless one feels he has no choice.  I suppose I feel that way.

 

Making it Right (and the difficulty of anger)

The world is not right, though it will insist it is, bashing you in the face as many times as necessary to prove it.  History does not proceed by justice, the law does not concern itself with trifles, like the American lynching that was winked at for a century after the Civil War.  You get a flawless receipt from every ATM you will ever visit, along with the exact amount of money you ask for, plus applicable fees, yet the same company that makes the ATMs will insist it’s impossible to guarantee the same accuracy in counting electronic votes in US federal elections.  There are a billion examples, literally, more than that if you go inside families, friendships, workplaces.

In a world as insistently corrupt as our own, how does an individual make it right?   We have the serenity prayer, which at times may guide us to accept the difference between truly maddening things we must fight and things that will only madden us.   I have nothing much to offer here, except to consider for a moment the role anger plays in these proceedings.

A friend’s recent reaction to anger caught my attention.  This cheerful, agreeable woman got angry, years ago, over something she took as a slight.  Her unusual show of temper was mentioned recently (note how slyly the passive voice is used) and she became very apologetic about it, almost worked up that we recalled it.   The words angry and mad are used interchangeably, and both are emotionally fraught words.  A stigma is attached to both, and for understandable reasons.  Angry, mad people often do terrible things.  Seeing people out of control, or feeling out of control ourself, strikes terror.

You read the book Everyone Poops?  A delightful Japanese book pointing out the obvious and showing various creatures pooping.  Here’s an illustrated post about it, keeping it classy, as the author says.  We all poop, very important.   It is clear what must be done regarding poop and we do it as often as necessary.   A very good thing it is, too.   We all get angry, and even funnier, we all have a right to be angry much of the time when we feel it.  It’s what to do with the anger that is the perplexing puzzle.    

It often gets turned inward, which goes badly almost every time.  We blame ourself for something as natural as pooping and wind up using it against ourselves– very bad, as bad as not pooping.  It gets barked at the wrong people, also bad, for at least two reasons.  The source of the anger remains untouched and a person who did not deserve blame got barked at.  Very fucked up.  It’s threatening to express anger to someone who can retaliate, so those who can’t or won’t fight back are often targets instead.  Speak truth to power?  Want to get fucked up, go right ahead.  Unless of course, that truth flatters power; power doesn’t mind that.

My old friend was determined, when he became the father of a brilliant and provocative child, to learn not to react to his child’s provocations with anger.  This sounds easy, but try it for twenty years or so, every waking moment, tired and distracted, in sickness and in health.   His mother had not done well in this department, not well at all.  Not many angry people do well in this department.  My friend did the hard work, I am always proud of the job he did in not repeating what was done to him.

We get mad when somebody hurts us in a strikingly unfair way, or in a way they know will hurt us.  This happens.  What we do after that makes all the difference.  I think of that wonderful line I saw at Buddha Bodai restaurant, under the glass on the table:  remain soft spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.  Wonderful advice.   Hard advice, but consider– if you care about the person who made you angry, what better way is there to respond?  If you have reason to be mad at yourself, what better way to speak than softly and with a tender willingness to forgive?

A Gentle Story

I try to walk at least five miles a day and I have a device clipped to my shirt that encourages me to do so, recording every step and hundredth of a mile (20 steps).   Some days lately walking this distance is about all I manage to accomplish, but, I’ll take my accomplishments where I can and as my father always said of such things “it’s better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.”

Walking in the Bronx last night, looking for a new route around the part of my usual path that takes me under ear shattering elevated trains, I walked down a street I’d never been on.  This empty street, a block or two long, is named Adrian Avenue.  As I reached the end of it I heard cries for help coming out of a window over my shoulder.  

Two women were piteously calling from a window in an alley, their necks thrust out into the night.  “Please help us, we’re locked in!” the younger of them cried as I turned to face them.  

I took out my cell phone.  “Who can I call for you?” was my first idea.

“No,” said the desperate woman, “come into the lobby and let us out!”

It was after 10 pm, the unfamiliar street was empty and quiet.  Two helpless women lure unknown man into lobby where accomplices wait to rob and beat him, I thought, tabloid style.  “How will I get into the lobby?” I asked the women.

“We’ll buzz you in,” the younger one said.

“And how will I be able to get you out if the door is locked?” I asked.

“We’ll throw the key out,” said the woman.

“What apartment are you in?” I said.  She gave me a number on the first floor.  They buzzed me into the small apartment building.  I saw their door and noticed there was no door knob on it.  I heard them inside.  There was no sign of anyone waiting with a blackjack.

Within a moment or two the key slid out under the door.  I turned the key and the door opened.  Both women were so happy to be rescued from their predicament they were practically giggling.  The older woman, in a dressing gown, beamed a grateful smile.  The younger one also beamed gratefully, pumping my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and thanking me profusely.  I smiled too, told them they were welcome, and went back to walking.

Less than 200 steps later I was at the end of Adrian Avenue, and looking left, realized the street did not go through in the direction I needed to go.  There would never be another reason to walk down Adrian Avenue, I realized, which made the odd coincidence of being there to do a good deed a little bit cooler.

Small Bits of Advice to Myself

Avoid sitting around in your underwear judging people who inevitably disappoint.  You can do this easily by putting on pants and a shirt when you get out of bed.

Busy people with good intentions, when confronted by a good cause they have ignored, or a friend in a pickle who asked for help and who they have not helped, react with guilt.  Guilt is the single most abundant and predictable characteristic of the well-intentioned person.  It can also be corrosive to the recipient, so beware.   Its first cousin is anger.  Guilt can become anger in a second, maybe they’re more like twins.

Look down from time to time to be sure you have pants and a shirt on.

One of the easiest ways to bludgeon someone in an intellectual joust is by reframing the issue.  Doing this can quickly paint them into a corner, force concessions over things they have not even raised, disorientingly shift the battle to a more comfortable and familiar field where your victory is assured and the point they are trying to make will never see the light of day.  

Reframing an issue to beat somebody up is an asshole move.  Try not to do it yourself.  If you are having your thoughts reframed to make you look like a fool, protesting the reframing itself will only make things worse for you and leave you further from the original discussion.  Change the frame by immediately conceding the point they are using to reframe things, even if just “for the sake of argument” (for the sake of avoiding an attempted bludgeoning, actually)  and refocus the conversation.  And check to make sure you have pants on.  

Reframing, of course, is also extremely useful to the person tormented by guilt.  By doing so the actual source of guilt, an acutely painful thing, can be avoided, while actively giving unsought advice or help in a way that can relieve the guilt.  Also an asshole move, but one is better off not judging it, since it is entirely rational behavior, if not helpful or desirable for the recipient.  Wear pants while dispassionately noticing this.  Changing the frame is rarely useful in these situations as it will often cause inflamed guilt to flare into anger.  Smile as much as possible and keep the following in mind:  remain mild and forgiving even when reason is on your side.

Lowering the expectation bar is often a good thing.  As a general principle one is well-served by being happy with less, rather than unhappy because so much more was reasonably expected.  

Feeling depressed that you seem to lack the mental energy to continue up the steep and demanding path you’ve chosen?  Be happy when you see an ad for a clinical trial on treating depression, which even includes treatment for the low-grade chronic form called dysthymia that has been used to describe your seeming psychological accommodation to a childhood spent in the company of monsters.   “Made my day!” you can chirp to yourself, jotting down the number, “help is just around the corner!”  If prone to procrastination, make sure you wait a few days to follow up by calling the information line.  Idly check pants pocket.

Take joy in small things.  Related to lowering the expectation bar, be happy when you are moving forward, even in almost imperceptible snail-like oozes.  Finally getting out of bed excited by a thought you had, even if that thought is a very small one– a small joy that must be embraced as the great motivation it is.  A small joy on a dour day is worth as much as a large joy on a happy day, maybe more.

I have more advice for myself, and anyone else who might take a useful example from any of it, but I have to change a small, but idiotic, mistake in a previous post, pointed out to me just now, if you will excuse me.  (He said, making a notably lame exit excuse.)