Buzz Kill

In my book, “Sto­ries From the Sea of Life,” I told the fol­low­ing story, about how our “bring­ing up” can so eas­ily point us away from our innate fas­ci­na­tion with being, and directly into avoid­ance, stuck­ness and boredom.

It’s amaz­ing what a lit­tle train­ing will do

On our last hol­i­day to the States, Dar and I camped out­side of Boston, one of our favorite cities. We were near to other campers, but not so near as to be intru­sive. I have, though, this thing about watch­ing peo­ple, as you never know when you might gain a story.

Across the way was a fam­ily con­sist­ing of two par­ents and a cou­ple of teenage girls. I tuned into them as they were pack­ing up their trailer and break­ing camp. As they had been there for a while, this was a major under­tak­ing. I was impressed with how well they seemed to know their jobs; the pack­ing was going swim­mingly. Sud­denly, the eldest daugh­ter pulled up short and pointed to the tarp she was untying.

Mom walked over. Soon, they were both talk­ing and point­ing at some­thing on the tarp. Their voices car­ried enough that I gath­ered that they were look­ing at some sort of cocoon that some kind of bug had spun. Mom and daugh­ter then engaged in a lively game of spec­u­lat­ing about what kind of bug would be inside of that cocoon. Finally, they decided to call good old dad over, no doubt to receive the final, defin­i­tive, male opinion.

Dad, beer belly in hand, wan­dered over. The women pointed. Dad stared. The women began to ply him with ques­tions. He appeared to hear noth­ing. He refused to enter into the enthu­si­asm. He reached out, swat­ted the cocoon off of the tarp, squished it with his foot, and went back to trailer dis-assembly, hav­ing spo­ken nary a word.

The women found a cou­ple of other cocoons, but they didn’t tell dad.

Isn’t it sad? Some­thing new, some mys­tery, some won­der — swat­ted into obliv­ion by some­one more inter­ested in crank­ing down the top of his trailer. No mat­ter what the oth­ers wanted. No mat­ter that this was impor­tant to them. Slap. Splat. Another dream bites the dust. Far bet­ter to stop, to lis­ten, to truly see. Won­der of won­ders, won­der is every­where, if we take the time to notice.

One of the more intrigu­ing things about both ther­apy and med­i­ta­tion is how often peo­ple argue for their stuck­ness.
By this I mean that they use one of two “excuses” for not acting.

1) The choice for help­less­ness, and 2) the infor­ma­tion short­age argument.

Help­less­ness

Many peo­ple are con­vinced that change is genet­i­cally impos­si­ble. Or that their upbring­ing pre­cludes doing things dif­fer­ently. Often, there is “enmesh­ment,” which is psycho-babble for being caught in the net of the relationship.

One woman I know has been, for the 20 years I’ve known her, caught in her family’s drama. Ini­tially, the issues was her rela­tion­ship with her mom. That merged into how her mom related to her dad. Then, how her brother and his fam­ily related to the mom and dad, and how that affected her rela­tion­ship with her mom and dad. Now, the par­ents are old, dad is head­ing down the Alzheimer’s path, and mom is feign­ing help­less­ness. Again, the daugh­ter thinks she is caught.

In each case, she talks about need­ing to dis­en­gage and get on with her life. Instead, she sup­presses her anger, makes her­self sick, and sug­gests that she no longer trou­bles her­self over what is hap­pen­ing. And, as she has done since I met her, when mom calls, she runs. She sighs, and says, “Well, in this case, I have no choice.”

Emo­tion­ally, the hook is in. Has been, in her case, since early child­hood. As it is for enmesh­ment, in all cases. It’s a hook that remains hid­den, unless we choose to look.

Knowl­edge

The sec­ond cause of paral­y­sis is the per­cep­tion that there is a knowl­edge gap. This one revolves around 2 poles: 1) not hav­ing enough knowl­edge, or 2) not know­ing the outcome.

The belief is that one can­not act until one is fully informed, and oddly and coin­ci­den­tally, one never has enough infor­ma­tion. Or that one can­not act until one has, some­how, obtained a 100% guar­an­tee, in advance that things will work out. Inter­est­ingly, when you push this lat­ter one, most peo­ple have no clue what “things work­ing out” would mean.

Back in the 80s, one of my col­leagues had dif­fi­culty with rela­tion­ships. She briefly mar­ried a psy­chi­a­trist, and after 8 weeks decided they were in an unre­solv­able power strug­gle. So she divorced him. That sum­mer, she inter­viewed the entire board of direc­tors of a char­ity she worked for, as she’d decided to find a new hus­band. The inter­views were ini­tially over din­ner, as she quizzed them on their per­son­al­i­ties, and were final­ized hor­i­zon­tally, in their room or hers.

By the end of the sum­mer, there was only one guy left. When I met him, he was open­ing her sugar packs, cut­ting her meat, and reply­ing “Yes dear!” I sug­gested that this was going to go nowhere fast. My friend said, “No! he’s per­fect! Finally, a man who lis­tens to me!” She mar­ried him.

Three years later, there she was on my doorstep, suit­cases in hand. “He never has an opin­ion, he leaves every­thing to me!” I attempted to talk with her about how she chose this kind of per­son, based upon what she assumed she wanted. She quickly let me know that it wasn’t her fault… that there was no way for her to know that a guy that always agreed with her would never have an opin­ion of her own.

Mov­ing past stuckness

At it’s best, Zen is about an invi­ta­tion out of the drama of our sto­ries. Not an expla­na­tion, not a “blam­ing,” but rather an invi­ta­tion into another way of see­ing and being. But notice, it is an enacted way of being, not a the­ory, or a learn­ing. By that I mean that it is some­thing done, not some­thing resisted or thought about.

In this, it is a dance.

The game is played, and in that play­ing, what emerges is “what is.” The ongo­ing moment can, and must, exist in a context-less way. Let me be clear what this means.

Firstly, I did not write, “Data–less”

Data is story-less. It, like expe­ri­ence, is sim­ply there. So, for exam­ple, know­ing one gets burned by fire is a datum—a frag­ment of data. Believe it or not, fire is not a bad or a good thing. It is sim­ply a tool, a process. Even being burned by steam (Hi Dar!) is nei­ther good nor bad—it’s just a thing.

Con­text is “story”—this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong. The datum, the raw fact of being, is trans­formed into a tale, typ­i­cally of woe, but per­haps of magic. The con­text takes on a life of its own, and we lose the abil­ity to notice that the data is not the story.

In both of the above exam­ples, the peo­ple involved are star­ing at a neu­tral sit­u­a­tion, and miss­ing the story they are telling them­selves. They do this by pre­tend­ing that the story in their heads is real­ity, and that real­ity, clearly, is wrong. Rather than see­ing what is “right there,” they run it through the fil­ter of their imag­i­na­tion, and then do not notice their story telling.

We must pay attention

On “the cush­ion, ” and in our lives, we must seek bare attention–attention devoid of all of the pro­jec­tions. What is, is. Data is valu­able, sto­ries are sto­ries. Fic­tions. Imag­in­ings. Act­ing because of them, or story-telling so as not to act at all—both approaches keep us stuck.

In each case, a far sim­pler way to approach things is to say, “What, in this moment, am I want­ing to accom­plish?” Ask­ing your­self that, you will inevitably think of some­thing to do. Then, do it. The key is that, in the moment, I can act, and then, in the next moment, eval­u­ate. and in the next, do more, or cor­rect my course.

This as opposed to doing noth­ing, or doing “what’s expected,” or deal­ing with things from an imag­i­nary place.

It is thus more about end­less flex­i­bil­ity and a will­ing­ness to exper­i­ment, to drop the “rules,” and to engage with what is “rally hap­pen­ing,” right there, in front of you.

And when sur­rounded by peo­ple who pre­fer Buzz Kill, to smile, and walk away.