The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [96]
Every morning I awoke in a foul mood and saw everything through a mesh of anger. If I hurried fast enough, the anger faded. I wanted my mind to be different; I wanted to just be in the world and be happy about that. Faintly, through my anger, I heard a beautiful day calling me. I could see it, but it was as though I were autistic. I knew it was pretty, but I didn’t feel it.
I tried to explain Julia’s taxes to her. She was mad at me for her loss of comprehension. I said nothing while she shouted. I left, my legs shaking with anger.
I had panic attacks whenever I approached her apartment. I panted; I couldn’t get enough air. One day, after being blasted once again for neglecting her, I thought I heard a car door slam in my driveway. I thought it might be her. My physical reaction was sheer terror.
I could have made a horror movie out of this: Here cometh the embodiment of all my guilt and worst fears about my future. Here cometh my own rage, my own self-accusations. Here cometh a situation that is always on the verge of spinning out of control. No wonder old women are monsters in fairy tales. No wonder children are trapped by them. We cannot run away because we cannot in good conscience abandon our parents. Even if we do run away, they pursue us, because no matter what we do, it is not enough.
I wondered if meditation might release me from the clutches of my own mind. I signed up for a weekend meditation retreat.
The first thing I discovered was the startling depth of my self-hatred. During those two days of sitting and walking, sitting and walking, I glimpsed a bit of light on the far side of the enormous room of my mind, and then I pulled myself back because I needed to hang on to my thoughts, lest my true self come screaming out of the darkness. I was sure the other meditators in the room were staring at me and finding me lacking.
The most valuable lesson from that first long weekend was one of forgiveness; no matter how many times my thoughts carried me away, no matter how many times I failed, I could always return to the breath and begin again. There was only this moment, with its limitless possibilities.
Maybe the value of my experience with Julia would come from working through it. This was a complicated love, a love born of necessity. How could I survive that love?
TWO WOMEN, DISROBING
A series of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, from his “Animal Locomotion” studies. A naked woman approaches another woman who is clothed in a Grecian robe. The first woman unwraps the robe from around the body of the second.
I was caught on the horns of compassion and rage. I saw Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart on a bookstore shelf and wanted nothing to do with it. Compassion was my problem. Look what it had gotten me into. Why would I want to practice it anymore? I didn’t understand what compassion was.
Compassion means caring for everyone, including yourself. It contains the irony of separating yourself from someone else even as you acknowledge that you are not separate. It means saying, “This is all I can do.” In The Places That Scare You, Pema Chödrön says, “In order not to break our vow of compassion, we have to learn when to stop aggression and draw the line. There are times when the only way to bring down barriers is to set boundaries.”
One day, I had a breakthrough with Julia. I went over to her apartment to work through her horrible finances. She wanted to be heard, like everyone else. So I let her talk. But I didn’t confuse compassion with enabling. That was the tricky part for me: knowing that understanding how someone feels does not mean that I have to take care of them, or do everything for them, or even condone their behavior.
I felt so sad for Julia, with her constrained finances and her constrained life. She couldn’t think straight or make any more money, and she knew it. During meditation, I contemplated compassion and understanding, detached from the conviction that I was responsible for fixing the misery. I could understand