Category Archives: Ahimsa

Truth and Reconciliation

Got a supremely annoying phone call from a former old friend.  I don’t know what the point of the call was, except to do the hideous dance one last time.  

In the course of an aggravating conversation he continually justified his unreliability, made oblique references to my over-sensitivity, laughed at one point when I was sputtering slightly to finish a point he’d interrupted a couple of times for shows of peevishness.  He was angry that I wouldn’t grant him it had been nervous laughter and not the passive aggressive enjoyment of a weak and angry person who had succeeded in making his antagonist mad.  How dare I presume he was being passive aggressive, how dare I not let him tell me why he was laughing while I was trying to control my anger!  

He told me I’d been vicious, in writing of his unreliability, characterizing it and him so uncharitably, no matter how hurt or angry I might have been.    “Sometimes writing can be much more vicious than speech,” he pointed out, “and the attempts to sublimate and refine the pain and anger are more damaging than just having out with it.  How hurtful do you suppose those things on the blahg were to me?”

I grant him the truth of that, as I grant him most things.  One thing I don’t grant is being shouted down when I am making a point.

“The first precondition of a meaningful apology is the recognition that the person apologizing has hurt the person he is apologizing to.  It is an acknowledgment of why the other person was hurt, a demonstration of empathy, followed by an admission that the behavior was wrong and some assurance of not repeating the hurtful behavior.   It’s like the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa…”  suddenly I’m cut off by a loud voice.

“That was about murder and a system of brutality!  Nobody was killed or brutalized here!  You have this overblown tendency to make everything like that, everything is Hitler to you,” he thundered pre-emptively dismissing any point I may have been about to make.

I managed to finish my point anyway, though my lungs hurt by the time I was through, and not because I’d been shouting for more than a few seconds to break back in to finish my point.  

It is a funny thing about experiences that smell similar to the childhood abuse I experienced– I feel a certain burning in my lungs whenever I’m near it.

“If you won’t acknowledge how hurtful what you did was, intentionally or not, how important the thing you promised to help me with was to me, how many hours, literally days, elapsed before you even got back to me….”

“I called you seven and a half hours later, how is it my fault you never got that missed call?  Why didn’t you keep calling me when you didn’t hear back?  I had bronchitis!  You wrote vicious things about me on the blahg.  You…”

An imaginary friend winks, tilts his long necked beer bottle to me.

“You would have been much better off forgetting the Ahimsa shit for a minute and just calling this clown and saying what you had to say originally, when he started calling you a couple of days too late, and leaving wheedling voice mails, and calling your girl friend when he couldn’t get an immediate call back from you … it’s kind of funny that he kept referring to your ‘nine days of enraged silence’ toward him, that master of enraged silence.  I like when you counted off that it had actually been more like four or five days.  But you should have just said what you had to say, Dude, in as few words as originally would have sufficed.”

“We’re done.  You’re a cunt.  Been nice.”  

“Clean,” he said, and took a drink.

It’s true, that’s what this call amounted to anyway, with a residing pain in the lungs to show for my sad attempt to stay on the high road, give a stubborn former friend a chance to state his insufficient case for the hundredth time.

“You hanging up on me?  You’re going to fucking hang up on me now?  Hello?  hello?”  I can still hear the peevish fellow justifying himself, clucking about how vicious and unfair I am.  “After all, you’re not the only one with problems, I’m not the only one who doesn’t help you, your constant references to Hitler, no matter the context, are inapt, and what about…’bon voyage’?  ‘bon voyage’?  oh, nice…. hello, hello?”

Fooling Myself?

The young therapist told me today to add some daily “mastery and pleasure activities” to my daily schedule.  These are fun interludes that remind us of what we love and what we have accomplished.  Apart from not really keeping a daily schedule, I told her as far as a satisfying mastery activity I have this daily writing session that ends with a press of the publish button.  

I am always satisfied and feeling somewhat better when I press the button.  Not that every post is a gem, or even worth more than a cursory glance, some may go to disturbing places, but the exercise of getting the post ready for the “public” is something I’ve mastered.  By the time I hit “post” the writing is as clear and easy to read as I can make it.  At its best this blahg is my higher self giving good counsel to my regular day to day self, reminding me of who I am trying to be, how far I have come, how far I still have to go.

A few weeks ago an old friend wondered why I spend so much time tapping these posts (it’s really less than an hour a day, I would think) and suggested it is far healthier to interact socially than to live in my mind as much as I do these days.  He’s right about the social interaction– this online social universe is actually a nightmare world of mostly disconnection and narcissism.  I explained to him that the illusion of a social life is not why I write here.    A week or two later he read a couple of posts that he admired, that touched him.  He wrote to single them out.  

I gave him the back story of one, Listening, and described the inspiration, a fellow very active on social media who anxiously reads the blahg whenever we have some kind of trouble (this latest round goes back months, including several long, patient, useless discussions about the issues, as with F before the end, and there are several posts related to it).  He was also struck by the one about madness from a few months back, which was also inspired by my faltering friendship with this same chap.  

The night after the second seder, as I waited for sleep to come, I had  a choice: spend an hour figuring out how to send the fellow the precise kiss-off he earned and deserved (a waste of time and energy), or trying to get to the deeper question involved — understand and digest the harm done to me and process my feelings about it.  It is an important exercise, understanding my feelings and getting past the hurt to react as nonviolently as I am able.

Writing made me think about it more deeply, make connections, allowed me to take something positive out of the otherwise distasteful experience.  Looking beyond the personal to the larger principle involved was helpful to me, as was the exercise of making it clear to a reader, and in the process, more clear to myself.  I think the piece could be helpful to others as well in laying out the human issues involved– the damage of not being listened to, the fruitlessness of one-sided relationships for the person on the wrong side.

 
I understand that this fellow was rarely, if ever, listened to, except by me at times.  I appreciate that things are not black and white, that he has fine qualities, a sense of humor, decency and so forth.  Still, individual acts and failures to act, particularly when they come one after another, form a pattern that speaks much louder than promises and conditional apologies.  Hitler had it rough, but if I had a time machine I’d go back and break every bone in his body if I could.   Maybe go back earlier and make sure his dear mother had an abortion.

My friend and I, I hardly needed to remind him, had it rough growing up, but we help when we can and try not to hurt when we can’t help.  We don’t build a fanatical political party and death camps and all that other fucked up shit.  We don’t leave people we care about hanging. To those who can’t help being hurtful, good riddance.

 
Our first duty is to preserve ourselves, an extra challenge for those of us who were forced to learn on our own to become our own protectors.  Sometimes quietly subtracting an unwitting underminer is the most positive thing we can do for ourselves on a given day.  

Black and White Thinking

My father, a lifelong black and white thinker, lamented on his death bed that he had not seen and appreciated all the colors and gradations of human experience.  “I think how much richer my life would have been,” he mused in a voice that was near the end.

I did not at that moment have any feeling besides sympathy for him as he went.  It was one of those times when everything aligned correctly and we were able to finally have the conversation he had never been capable of.  It’s not clear how much of a long-term blessing it was for me, though it felt enormous at the time.  I’m sure it was a blessing to him, to be able to unburden himself to a life-long adversary he’d created, a suddenly former adversary who was now gently helping him go.  

I think of my father first whenever I hear the term Black and White Thinking.  Those words are on a sheet the CBT therapist gave me during the last session.  Ten ways people suffer and ten ways each form of, what is essentially deleterious cognition, can be changed for the better by properly reframing them.  I don’t know how much faith I have in this whole system, though the value of going to this session every week, working myself out of my torpor, seems beyond question.   I face many obstacles in a possibly impossible undertaking I have staked everything on, but I am facing them one at a time again.  Waiting for the mapped redesigned website to load at wehearyou.net so I can return to my marketing and networking efforts.

My father’s black and white thinking arose from the facts of the world he was born into.  His mother hated his father.  She had done her duty with him and eight or nine months later their first child was stillborn.   She lay with him again.   The second child, my father, was a huge baby.  She was a tiny, furious woman.  She cursed him before she even saw him.   Once he could stand she began whipping him in the face for what felt to her like a baby’s defiance.  

I have to get in the shower and down to my session in a moment, but I leave you with this excellent TED talk I heard last night.  It was about the long-term changes in a human mind and body produced by childhood trauma.  The chemicals that are available to us in a moment of danger, things that give you a surge of strength and concentration to fight or flee, constantly flood the child who must be on guard against, say, a whip in the face from mom.   This does damage that is hardwired into the human body.   Listen to this pediatrician.  The talk is fifteen minutes long and well worth your time.

Listening

You have never really been listened to, granted.

I grant you everything.  I grant you the pain of never really ever having been listened to.  It is a primal pain, to feel that when you first spoke, until now, that you have rarely, if ever, been attentively listened to.   Dig it.  Many people, sadly, experience this in life.  It is a trauma that puts a heavy burden on the soul.

I knew a woman who said she loved me, acted very much like she did.   She did very loving things for me, was generous with her love.  I could tell she hurt when I hurt.  She gave me advice sometimes about my life, what she thought I should do to be in less pain.  She told me she was giving me the same advice she had found useful in her life.   When she was dispensing advice she told me she always talked to me the same way she spoke to herself.

I did not doubt this, even as I often resisted some of her advice.  One day, when she tried to insist, I said to her “but sometimes you have talked to yourself and convinced yourself the best thing to do was to put your head in the oven.”  She was quiet.  She had told me of these moments of weakness, the things she had done in desperate moments.  I wasn’t telling her this to make her feel bad, I was reminding her of the difference between us, and how we treat ourselves, to put her advice in perspective.  

“I remind you of this to illustrate as vividly as I can, so you will have no doubt — if someone tried to put my head in an oven I would fight them to the death.   I would never put my own head in an oven.”   Just saying.  She still offered advice from time to time, but I think this perspective stayed with her.

People who care about you will sometimes give you advice, with the best of intentions.  They tell you things meaning very much to help.   They may never have been really listened to themselves.  Many people were not.  They learned as best they could, filled their lives as best they could with the things they needed and never got in life.   They took whatever wisdom they were able to find and they try to share it with you out of concern.   Not all of these people can help you.  In fact, few can actually help you.  

Turns out the thing that probably helps the most is someone listening to you with enough care to hear what you are actually saying.  This kind of listening does not  assume it knows what you are about to say and does not respond to what it thinks you may have said, based on the past.  

Empathy turns out to be the best thing one person can give to another, the best thing we can give ourselves.  It is a question of attention– of asking questions when things are unclear, until you understand.  It is a question of time, being generous with your time to hear what the other person is really concerned about.  In my experience it is almost impossible for  a person who is niggardly with their time or attention to be a valuable friend or even a good person to talk to.

A sufficiently mature person can tolerate being ignored, forgotten, slighted, thought of last, if at all, and can make philosophical accommodations to all these things.  But when a person who claims to care for your well-being does these things, you must not tolerate it.  Care does not include these things.  

So, best to be direct.  I have told you as clearly as I can what hurts me in your actions.  I have told you again.  I have explained it on a third and fourth occasion.  I have given you every fair chance to do better.  You have not done better, you have done worse.  If you have not done worse on purpose, you did it because you were not capable of doing better.  You did not care enough.  I understand your limitations in friendship better than I did before.

You were not taught to care enough, nobody showed you how it should be done.  That is true for many people, no doubt.  It is the rare and blessed person who is shown the way to care for others.  Most of us have to learn it as we go, the best we can.

I am trying hard to be a man of peace, and I succeed more often now than before in my life.   I understand that self-hatred and confusion drive some people to act destructively, to themselves and others.  But understanding the reason for it does not give permission to anyone to act destructively.  Hitler had a horrible childhood, clearly.  But fuck Hitler.

We come in the end to the point where the only question remains:  hand open or hand closed when it bids you peace and go in good health?

Me and babies

I enjoy working and playing with kids, though I’ve never really been a big fan of infants.   Babies, before they can do anything, cute though they sometimes might be (and uncute as they just as often are) are kind of creepy in their helplessness.   That the infant’s ability to communicate is far more limited than Sekhnet’s cat also interferes with my complete enjoyment of very young babies.   Nonetheless, I recognize that you have to participate in other people’s joy in their babies.  It seems inhuman not to at least smile, and coo and make some melodic remark about the baby’s cuteness.

Sekhnet’s cousin, a new single mother, asked Sekhnet and me if we wanted to hold the baby the other day.   It was the first time either of us had seen mother and child since the birth. The baby was born the weight of an average dinner lobster, many weeks prematurely, and now, three months later, has ballooned to eight pounds.   The mother offered the baby and, as Sekhnet hesitated, I took the tiny child, smaller than a miniature doberman.
 
I gently picked her up, held her in front of me and smiled at her.   She burst out crying.  Her mother was amazed, laughed and kept saying she’d never seen that reaction.  She must have said it ten times.  
 
Afterwards, and in spite of all my graciously accepted apologies to the mother, who kept repeating that the little girl had never reacted that way, ever, to anything, I felt pretty good knowing I still haven’t lost my touch with babies.

Finding a new web host

Apparently there are many, many web hosting services.  GoDaddy was recommended to me years back and hosted my first sites.  I bought the domain name wehearyou.net from them and they are currently hosting a site I created on WordPress for the student-run animation workshop.

I have several free WordPress sites.  On each of them I can put up galleries like the one above, which I have just perfected.  I planned to have a gallery like this on the redesigned static home page I would send people to view at wehearyou.net.  

This new page would do what every Marketing 101 student learns the first day:  make things clear at a glance to anyone with an attention span of at least five seconds.   The page would say:

photo (1)

and have some more animated stuff to look at and links to galleries of animations by the kids:

It would also have a brief explanation, like:

Children, with adults on hand to listen and assist, perform every facet of animation production:  equipment set up, ideas, art work, choreography, photography, computer editing and multitrack sound recording.  A classroom quickly becomes a beehive of purposeful collaboration, combining equal parts free imagination and exacting precision to make good looking animation.   

I can make these galleries on each of my free websites, as I have made this page just now.  The one hosted by GoDaddy does not allow me to create animated galleries or even to import working animated gifs, these little looping animations you see here.

Two hours of tech support with GoDaddy resulted in this:  “I wouldn’t blame you if you cancel your service contract with us, even though it wasn’t our fault and the functionality works on our end, and even though I understand your logic.”

The logic the supervisor understood was that if a customer has four virtually identical sites, three free and one hosted by GoDaddy, and only the one hosted by GoDaddy presents a problem, then the problem, absent a better explanation, is related to GoDaddy.  

Two hours exercising patience for no earthly reason.  Except to have what functionality there was left on the wehearyou.net site before the call disabled now after the update that was not the responsibility of GoDaddy since WordPress is an open source third party.

Need to find a new web hosting outfit toot sweet.  That’s the name of that annoying tune.

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.