Stopping Time

“Time is thus understood in Buddhism always to be inseparable from things as ever-changing.”

Masao Abe, Zen and Comparative Studies

Most of us feel pretty celebratory about the passage of time with the shift away from the challenging year of 2020 to what we hope is a more promising year ahead with 2021. But often we cling to the past instead, which is a very bad idea indeed.

Charles Dickens provided a haunting literary example of clinging to the past in his novel Great Expectations where we meet Miss Havisham.

We meet her fairly early in the novel—unlike most of the characters who only know her by reputation, for Miss Havisham has shut herself inside her home for decades cut off from the world and attempting to stop time. When our narrator and main character, Pip, meets Miss Havisham, he notes that all of her clocks have stopped at 8:40.

His description of her is vivid.  “She was dressed in rich materials—satins, and lace, and silks—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. . . .She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,—the other was on the table near her hand. . . .I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.”

The brilliance of Dickens’ choice of a woman stood up on her wedding day and still wearing her bridal garb allows us to see that Miss Havisham is now a ghost of a woman who sits “corpse-like” in wedding clothes that now appear “so like grave-clothes,” the veil “so like a shroud.”

Almost the first thing that she says to Pip is that her heart is “Broken!” “She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it.”

Miss Havisham stops time to revel in the moment of her victimhood, doing all that is humanly possible to extend it, allowing herself to be swallowed whole by anger and in such fashion as to victimize others, particularly her young ward Estella whom she trains up to break the hearts of men, leaving Estella without a compassionate heart.

We might even say that Miss Havisham feasts upon her victimhood, a rotten feast indeed. Like her dressing room, the table where the wedding feast would have occurred has been left exactly as it was at 8:40 when Miss Havisham got the letter breaking her heart.

However, time inexorably moves on, so even as Miss Havisham has stopped the clocks, her stocking is ragged where she has walked shoeless, the white is now yellow, and the centerpiece on the table (once her wedding cake) is “so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable. . . .I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it.”

Miss Havisham has had decades to recover from rejection, but she clings to it like a prize, and she tells Pip that her dead body will eventually be laid to rest upon that table.

Mindfulness means being in the present moment without judgment. Miss Havisham refuses to do that, stubbornly clinging to a moment from the past that she has allowed to define the rest of her life. Her attempt to stop time makes herself and all around her miserable. Time has not healed her wounds because she has chosen to freeze time. But, of course, that rotten wedding cake and her white hair prove that she can no more freeze time than she can go back in time and prevent her fiancé from breaking her heart. The reality is that Miss Havisham has broken her own heart and  continues to do so daily.

The only time that exists is now. Even if now is difficult or challenging, to be in the current moment is our only real choice if we want any shot at happiness.

As Miss Havisham demonstrates, clinging to the past will bring us—and those around us—misery and broken hearts.

Photo by Joel Overbeck on Unsplash

The Grief Store

“The sorrow of great and small losses is a river that runs in the underground of all our lives.”

Roshi Joan Halifax

I shared with a dear friend recently that I had such a surplus of grief that I could open a grief store if anyone were buying.

But no one needs to buy grief. We all experience it, and that has rarely been so universally true as we’ve moved through a global pandemic.

We’ve all experienced great and small losses. Alas, some of us have been ill ourselves or watched loved ones suffer from covid-19 or perhaps even lost someone we care about to this disease. Maybe we have felt the effects less directly. Anxiety and depression levels are skyrocketing, and we might have suffered from both or shepherded a loved one through these painful emotions. I could go on: job loss, isolation, loneliness, etc.

Grief is about loss. We’ve all lost something.

So the question is now what do we do about it.

Once again, we can turn to that fount of wisdom, The Office, for help.

In an episode entitled “Grief Counseling,” Michael Scott learns that his former boss, Ed Truck, has died. At first, Michael is appropriately and mildly upset. However, when he shares the news with the rest of his staff, Kelly responds with immediate sympathy saying he must feel terrible, giving the always-seeking-the-spotlight Michael the attention that he constantly craves.

When Michael attempts to milk the situation, though, he discovers that there are limits to the patience of his staff and of his supervisor who rejects his proposal to erect a statue to Ed Truck—a man, it should be noted, whom the audience has met briefly before so that we know Michael’s grief comes not from deep friendship but is primarily about himself.

Michael’s solution is to hold a grief counseling session where he demands that each employee share a story of losing someone important; crying is okay, even encouraged. He goes first, saying Ed Truck’s death makes it feel as if “somebody took my heart and dropped it into a bucket of boiling tears. And, at the same time, somebody else is hitting my soul in the crotch with a frozen sledgehammer.

It all comes to a head when Toby attempts to reason with Michael (always a mistake, especially for Toby, Michael’s human resources nemesis) by telling him about a bird who died that morning by flying into the glass doors. Toby is reminding Michael that death is a universal fact of life.

Projecting all of his anguish on the bird, Michael rushes immediately to the parking lot to find its corpse, proclaiming that the office must hold a funeral for it.

Michael really does feel anguish and grief at this point, but it’s not for Ed Truck. What he feels is alone, isolated, and fearful that he will meet a lonely death with no one to mourn him.

So they have a bird funeral in the parking lot with a beautifully decorated bird casket, Dwight playing the recorder, a eulogy, and singing—all thanks to Pam who sees what is truly happening with Michael, a man who calls his employees family and aches for real emotional connection.

Therein lies the remedy for grief: connection.

Grief comes from a feeling of loss, but Buddhism reminds us that we are all interconnected, not only as family or as humans but to all life on the planet.

Grief connects us, and this has never been so true as it is now when each of us is grieving something or someone. Even as we may ache from the isolation that the pandemic has imposed, we can remind ourselves that we are not alone in our feelings of sorrow and loss.

Or, as Pam said at the funeral for the bird, “he was by himself when he died. But, of course, we all know that doesn’t mean he was alone.”

Photo Courtesy of Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash

Old Friends and New Perspectives

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And auld lang syne?”

Robert Burns, “Auld Lang Syne?”

At the end of the movie When Harry Met Sally, the title characters have an epiphany at a New Year’s Eve Party with “Auld Lang Syne” playing in the background.

Harry says, “What does this song mean? My whole life, I don’t know what this song means. I mean, should old acquaintance be forgot? Does that mean that we should forget old acquaintances, or does it mean that if we happen to forget them, we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them?”

Sally isn’t sure but replies, “Anyway, it’s about old friends.”

If you only know the movie through its infamous fake orgasm scene, it’s a romantic comedy that has Sally and Harry meeting in 1977 at the University of Chicago and follows them to New York until 1989, the year of the film’s release. But the message is deeper than women fake orgasms and boy meets girl.

It is, in a loose way, similar to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a novel that she initially entitled First Impressions, for both Harry and Sally make poor first impressions on each other that kind of stick, and each has something to learn from the other—just as Austen’s Elizabeth and Darcy do.

First impressions are important, of course, especially for a social species like humans. And sometimes our gut reactions are spot on. Any time our instincts signal to us that someone is dangerous, we should trust that.

Sometimes, though, we equate actions with identity in ways that get us stuck. We fail to recognize a moment as a moment and turn it into a defining moment.

A Harvard study found that people generally acknowledged how much they had changed in the past but tended to grossly underestimate how much they will change in the future. The participants saw their current identity, no matter what their age, as a stable one, a sort of end game that previous change had brought them to permanently.  However, the evidence—their own reading of their own lives as filled with change—predicts that they will continue to change.

Long-term relationships change because the people within them change, but if we stubbornly hold on to first impressions and our idea of someone’s stable identity—which does not exist—we will feel threatened by those inevitable changes.

I don’t know if Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns had any of this in mind as he wrote “Auld Lang Syne” in 1788, and he didn’t intend it to become a New Year’s anthem. That came about in the nineteenth century in Scotland and in North America in the early twentieth century thanks to Canadian bandleader Guy Lombardo.

But I can see why it’s the perfect ending to When Harry Met Sally and a beautifully symbolic song as we end a year and begin a new one.

We should not forgot our acquaintance—our loved ones, our friends, our family—but we should begin anew with them also. We need to allow ourselves and all those we love to change and grow and potentially become very different from the people who made that first impression.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, ““If you do not give right attention to the one you love, it is a kind of killing.” To force someone into a script we wrote at our first meeting is a kind of killing.

Let each of us as the clock strikes midnight (assuming, unlike me, you can stay up that late) look at our “auld acquaintance” with fresh perspective and new appreciation. And, given our isolation in 2020 moving on into the beginning of 2021, if you are only looking at the mirror at your own lovely face, give yourself that right attention that you deserve.

Happy blessed, beautiful, love-filled, healthy New Year to all of you!

Photo Courtesy of Danil AksenovonUnsplash

Anxiety, Buddy the Elf, Linus, and the Dalai Lama

“Treat every day like Christmas.”

Buddy the Elf

Anxiety is an important evolutionary adaptation that has kept our species alive. It also feels lousy.

Unlike fear, which is focused on something or someone specific, anxiety is more a diffuse feeling that something, someone, somewhere may harm us. That’s why it feels lousy.

At the same time, if our ancestors had lacked anxiety, we wouldn’t be around today. A little anxiety kept our ancestor from becoming a lion’s next meal if he heard a rustling in a bush and considered there might be danger. Of course, most of the time, the rustling was caused by a bunny, but neglecting that one time it was a lion meant being lion dinner.

Social anxiety, the most prevalent form of anxiety in our culture, served an evolutionary purpose too. Our ancestors lived in small groups with members dependent upon each other for survival. We aren’t designed to take on the world solo. This means that, if we were evicted from our group, it was likely a death sentence.

Alas, our highly sophisticated brains still have a reptilian part that can’t tell we no longer live in the Pleistocene era. This means though we might get kicked out of a group today with no life or death consequences, our anxious minds still feel like we might die.

This brings me to Buddy the Elf: a lovable character due to his lack of social anxiety. Thanks to growing up in the North Pole with Santa and a loving adopted elf father, Buddy enters New York City fearlessly, even knowing his biological dad is on the naughty list. Buddy offers nothing but Christmas good cheer to all whom he meets, never worried about how foolish he appears in his elf garb or when singing in public.

When his naughty father eventually rejects him quite forcefully, Buddy grows sadder and wiser, but his openness and kindness reform naughty dad, and Buddy never knows true tragedy.

Like Buddy, and a child rather than childlike, Linus of the Peanuts Gang owns who he is without anxiety over rejection from his social group. He carries that blanket with him everywhere he goes, using it as part of his shepherd costume rather than allowing bossy Lucy to take it away from him.

With Linus, we see a little more awareness. Otherwise, why would he need a security blanket? Because he is less oblivious than Buddy, he also is wiser, warning Charlie Brown away from the tree that he knows will lead to bullying.

More importantly, Linus understands and shares the true meaning of Christmas. In the face of pageantry, dancing, and Lucy styling herself as Christmas queen, Linus publicly recites the spiritual reason for Christmas, reminding the kids “on earth peace, good will toward” all. 

Recently, the Dalai Lama posted on Facebook that, “If we pay more attention to ways to develop peace of mind our actions will be more conducive to peace.”  

Christmas can be a time when we remember that we have the gift of peace if we choose to cultivate it rather than our social anxiety. We can do so by offering good will toward all, for if we can recognize in each other our human family, we can soothe that social anxiety that makes us fear each other. It’s not a Christmas miracle so much as a practice, one that can be really tough.

This does not mean that we should stick around naughty dad no matter what or actually allow Lucy to punch us if she’s unhappy that we’re carrying around our security blanket. Never be bullied.

But know that you are part of a human family, no matter your own family situation, that you can offer yourself and others peace, and that we all can be instruments of good will.

That would indeed be a glorious Christmas gift.

Photo Courtesy of Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Christmas Ghosts

“There’ll be scary ghost stories

And tales of the glories of

Christmases long, long ago.””

George Wyle and Eddie Pola, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I’ve always found the line about “scary ghost stories” in the Andy Williams classic Christmas carol a bit jarring, but Christmas ghost stories have a centuries old tradition even before Charles Dickens made Christmas ghosts so famous in A Christmas Carol.

Dickens’ choice of ghosts was logical given the history of Christmas ghost stories. Moreover, Dickens himself was a haunted man.

This appears in many of his works, which tend to include the dispossessed, the vulnerable, the orphaned, and the abused who experience shame and guilt.

Dickens’ father landed the family in debtors’ prison when Dickens was only 12. Dickens had aspirations to be a gentleman, and this seemed like the end to that goal as he was set to work in a shoe polish factory to support his family. He worked long hours for small wages but only for a few months since his father was able to settle his debts. Alas, his mother wished him to return to the factory rather than to school. He didn’t, but he never forgot what felt like neglect and a lack of love.

This is exactly the situation for the infamous Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser who must learn from ghosts in the novella meant to ease Dickens’ own financial woes at the time.

From the Ghost of Christmas Past, Scrooge gets to see himself as a lonely, abandoned child who turns to stories for comfort. The hardhearted Scrooge recognizes that at one time he was vulnerable, still open to love and imagination. He also visits his apprentice self, a young man who knew how to have fun. Most importantly, he relives his fiancée breaking their engagement. She explains that another idol has replaced her because Scrooge fears “the world too much.” He has chosen money as a shield to protect him from being that vulnerable little boy again.

The Ghost of Christmas Present allows Scrooge to visit those who are vulnerable and merry, just as he was as a young person, and to connect his own past with the pain he has caused others out of that fear that Belle accused him of having.

By the time the Ghost of Christmas Future appears, Scrooge gets it. The attempt to avoid vulnerability was fruitless, for now, in death, he is vulnerable to the thieves who would steal the very nightclothes from his body, and no one cares about his death except to celebrate escaping his aggressive attempts to collect debts with no concern for the welfare of others.

As with his other works, much of Dickens and those ghosts of his past are present here. He was so traumatized by his experience of debt and child labor that he told almost no one, and the experience seems to have hung like a specter over him throughout his life.

If we are not mindful, the same will be true for all of us. Too often, we respond via habit energy rather than to what is occurring in the moment. We don’t see or hear what is truly happening thanks to the ghosts of our pasts.

Perhaps rather than telling ghost stories this year, we might ask ourselves who or what are our ghosts. What, like Scrooge, makes us pretend that we aren’t vulnerable? What fear might be driving us?

Rather than wait for New Years and a resolution, we could try some Christmas self-examination.

Dickens ends his story before the very famous “God bless Us, Every One!” by telling us that Scrooge “had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!”

Once we name those ghosts, like Scrooge, we can say goodbye to that habit energy forever and “keep Christmas well … all of us!”

Photo Courtesy of Filip Bunkens on Unsplash

Why the Grinch Stole Christmas

“The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season! Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.”

Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

With all due respect to Dr. Seuss, I think I know the reason. But before I can share it, we have to talk about Beowulf.

You may have read this earliest piece of British literature at some point in high school or college, and if you read it with me as your professor, you know that I see the Grinch as a modern-day, children’s literature version of the monster Grendel in Beowulf.

Grendel is terrorizing King Hrothgar’s kingdom, going into the mead hall at night and killing warriors for no apparent reason. He doesn’t abide by the rules of the game. It was a violent time, and warriors killed and died, but there was a proper way to go about that, which included appropriate motivation, such as revenge. Grendel doesn’t care. He is relentless and monstrous.

The anonymous author of Beowulf tells us of the time before Grendel’s attacks when the mead hall rang with song and story and explains that for Grendel:

It was with pain that the powerful spirit

dwelling in darkness endured that time

hearing daily the hall filled

with loud amusement;” (lines 80-83)

As King Hrogthar’s people come together as a community to celebrate each other, victory, and God, Grendel lives outside of society, an “unhappy being” filled with rage who attacks to stop the “NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!”

Oh, wait. That’s the Grinch. But you get why I see the connection.

Grendel kills because he is a monstrous being shut out from human society unable to endure the sound of joyous community.

And the Grinch, in milder fashion, does much the same without the gore, instead stealing all the trappings of Christmas, “Leaving crumbs/Much too small/For the other Whos’ mouses!” We get all the details of the how just as the title promises.

But the why is there too. Just like Grendel, the Grinch lacks love, and rather than wondering why all that noise bothers him, he decides to rid the world of the noise.

The Grinch doesn’t succeed, of course, for on Christmas morning, he hears the Whos singing and realizes, “He HADN’T stopped Christmas from coming! IT CAME! Somehow or other, it came just the same!”

And with this awareness, “the Grinch’s small heart/Grew three sizes that day!”

Unlike Grendel who persists in his hatred and loses an arm and then his life in an epic fight with Beowulf, the Grinch understands that he wasn’t plagued by noise but by his own small heart responding wrongly to the joyous sounds below.

When Christmas comes without ribbons, tags, packages, boxes, and bags for the Whos, the Grinch realizes that Christmas “means a little bit more.” He then loses his hatred and envy, entering into the festivities.

In a previous post, I talked about the Buddhist definition of true love, one component being sympathetic joy, which is being happy for others. When we are not, the Beowulf poet and Dr. Seuss teach us that we can become isolated and filled with hate, perhaps even a bit monstrous.

There’s another important lesson from those Whos for us this year in particular. Thanks to the pandemic, we may not be able to “FEAST! FEAST! FEAST! FEAST!” together as we have in the past. We can grieve that while still remembering that Christmas “means a little bit more” and raise our voices in sympathetic joy with those Whos down in Whoville—plus the Grinch.

Photo Courtesy of Andreas Avgousti on Unsplash

The Downside of Hope

“There’s a hope in hopeless, so things are looking up.”

Whitehorse, Trophy Wife

Western culture values hope.

In The Divine Comedy, fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri inscribed above the gates of hell, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Once in hell, there’s no escape from eternal torture, no hope of heaven.

So hope seems like an obvious good.

And maybe you’ve used the word hope a lot in 2020. I hope things go back to normal. I hope there’s a vaccine soon. I hope . . . there’s a lot we could fill in after that word “hope” given the challenges of the last year.

However, in her book When Things Fall Apart (a great read for 2020), Buddhist nun Pema Chodron points to the downside of hope. She writes, “Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other . . . Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty” (88).

In other words, we turn to hope because we feel we are experiencing lack. If things are fine, we don’t need hope. Fear accompanies hope because we fear things won’t turn out in the way we prefer, in the way that we hope. To put too much stock in hope pulls us out of the present moment and has us living in the future, both hoping for and afraid of what will come.

I suppose Dante would offer more good examples, but I’m going to use another important classic to make my point: the 1983 film A Christmas Story.

Set in the 1940s, the film is narrated by a now-adult Ralphie who at the time of the story is a boy who wants nothing more than a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. We watch as Ralphie plots how to get this much-desired toy, which he knows adults will object to by saying, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Ralphie writes an essay at school whose prose he feels sings, sure that he will earn an A and get his teacher on his side in his quest to get the Red Ryder BB gun. She responds with a C+ and a note that he’ll shoot his eye out. Though he no longer believes in Santa, he endures an incredibly long line to ask the department store Santa for a Red Ryder BB gun. Santa responds with, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” And on it goes. Yet Ralphie keeps on plotting and hoping.

And Ralphie gets his Red Ryder BB gun! Of course, he only discovers this after ripping through wrapping paper on numerous other gifts, which he could not care less about. Finally, his father asks if he got everything he wanted. A polite Ralphie mutters, trying to hide his disappointment. His father points to the one last present hidden away, and Ralphie’s hopes have come true. He immediately runs outside, not even remembering to get dressed, and shoots that BB gun. The Red Ryder BB gun recoils, butts into Ralphie’s glasses, and breaks them. He’s sort of shot his eye out.

For weeks, Ralphie spends his energy on hoping for that Red Ryder BB gun. His happiness lasts about five minutes until coming face-to-face with the fear of shooting that eye out.

The movie is a comedy, so Ralphie’s eye is fine, and he puts on his old glasses. The last scene is of a happy Ralphie cuddling the gun in bed on Christmas night.

Hope isn’t bad. Ralphie ends up happy. But Ralphie also creates a lot of unnecessary stress for himself by putting all of his energy into hoping rather than enjoying the Christmas season. He trades all sorts of opportunities to be happy by concentrating only on hope—and the fear that things won’t turn out the way that he wants.

It’s good to have hope, but we don’t want to let the accompanying fear make us fail to see the sources of happiness that are in front of us in the here and now or lead us to believe that the only way we can be happy is for things to turn out the way that we hope.

I hope that we all enjoy this Christmas season.

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It’s A Wonderful Life

“Remember, George: no man is a failure who has friends.”

Clarence Odbody, Angel Second Class

I promise I’m not skipping Thanksgiving to get right to Christmas. Though It’s a Wonderful Life became a classic Christmas film thanks to the closing scenes celebrating Christmas, for me, the movie is all about Thanksgiving.

Every year, I try to watch It’s a Wonderful Life on Thanksgiving night (and maybe again at Christmas because I love it).

Most of you probably know the movie, but I want to summarize it. The protagonist, played by Jimmy Stewart, was born in a small town in New York, Bedford Falls. George yearns for adventure from the time of his childhood and to escape Bedford Falls where there’s not much adventure to be had. However, his father dies as George finally saves enough money to go to college. He gives his college fund to his younger brother Harry and stays behind to run the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan, his father and uncle’s business. When he graduates, rather than returning home to give George an escape from Bedford Falls, the newly-married Harry accepts an out-town-job at George’s urging once he hears it’s a great opportunity. George marries and misses his honeymoon thanks to spending all of his money to save the Building and Loan during a run on the bank. He moves with his wife Mary into a rundown home that they must fix up, drives a beat up old car, and has four children that make the budget even tighter. Thanks to being deaf in one ear as a result of saving Harry, who had fallen through the ice when they were children, George doesn’t even leave Bedford Falls to serve in WWII. Eventually George ends up on Christmas Eve considering suicide because his uncle has lost deposit money (well, had it stolen by the awful Mr. Potter), and the only solution George can think of is killing himself for the insurance money.

You can see why I love such an uplifting movie, right?

It was never a conscious decision to link It’s a Wonderful Life with Thanksgiving, but when I reflect on it, I realize that it’s because this is a movie about gratitude.

George is stopped from killing himself by Clarence, the somewhat bumbling apprentice angel who’s been in heaven a while but has yet to earn his wings. From his childlike perspective, Clarence has the wisdom to recognize that George has not lived a heroic life like his brother who is being awarded a Medal of Honor for his bravery in WWII. George has done better, for, instead, every day George has made the decision to live his life in a way that is of benefit to all those around him.

Clarence gives George the opportunity to see what life would be like in Bedford Falls if he had never been born. It turns out, as Clarence says, that “Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

When the town finds out about George’s financial troubles, everyone pours into his home, offering him whatever money they have on hand, no questions asked, because they feel gratitude for the quiet and solid difference that George has made in their lives. And George, who never had the adventure he wanted, smiles broadly, tears in his eyes, feeling gratitude, thanking everyone there and the now-in-heaven Clarence.

It’s a Wonderful Life was not a success when it was first released in theaters. Audiences thought it was too dark, and the summary in its bare bones makes it sound that way, but taken from a heaven’s eye view like Clarence’s, this is a story of light.

Ultimately, we are all George Bailey. Each of us lives a life that touches so many others. Like George, let us hope that we do that with authenticity, demonstrating everyday heroism that brings light and love to those around us.

As Clarence reminds George, a wonderful life is one filled with friendship. This Thanksgiving, I am particularly thankful for the friends who feel like family and for those dear family members who have offered kindness and support, whether they are here with me on earth or hanging out with Clarence Odbody in heaven.

Photo Courtesy of Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash

Suffering and Magical Thinking

“Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.”

Samuel Johnson

I’m writing this awaiting the arrival of hurricane Eta, which was maybe going to hit the Tampa area, and then almost certainly wasn’t, and now is. In fact, from the time I began writing to finishing this piece, Eta changed from tropical storm to hurricane. That’s what life is like living on the Gulf coast.

 Contemplating that unfortunate reality, I thought of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. Johnson was such a pivotal figure in eighteenth-century England that those of us who study literature from that period have sometimes referred to it as the age of Johnson. He’s not so well known today, but, to give an example of his influence, he wrote the first authoritative English dictionary, pretty much single handedly.

We probably don’t read Johnson so much now because of the style of his writing. He was very concerned with sending the right moral message. In one of his pieces called “On Fiction,” he argued, for example, that fictional characters should be straightforwardly moral and worthy of emulation or obviously unremittingly evil. Prioritizing moral message over realism and relatability means he hasn’t withstood the test of time quite so well as Jane Austen.

But his lessons were insightful, which brings me back to Rasselas, published in 1759. Written to cover the cost of his mother’s funeral, Rasselas is about the search for happiness, one of Johnson’s lifelong subjects.

Like the Buddha who set out in search of enlightenment, Rasselas goes on a quest to find the true source of human happiness, meeting others from all walks of life along the way.

I haven’t read Rasselas in decades and only read it the one time, but I’ve never forgotten the astronomer. He is convinced that he controls all aspects of the weather but the winds and laments that storms like hurricane Eta have wreaked so much destruction in spite of his best efforts.

I confess that I engage in this kind of magical thinking, at least some of the time and all of the time when it comes to Gator football. My lucky shirt is responsible for the Gators winning their first national championship in 1996. I wore the shirt every game from kick off to end of the the fourth quarter—all victories—except twice that season. When the Gators were inexplicably losing to Vanderbilt, I pulled my still-damp shirt from the dryer, and the team won. The one game I didn’t wear it, the Gators lost to FSU, but since I was there in person wearing the shirt at the Sugar Bowl for the national championship, of course they beat FSU big in a rematch. Those are indisputable facts.

But with great power comes a strong sense of responsibility. (I still to feel a little guilty about not wearing the lucky shirt when we played FSU the first time).

Therefore, rather than reveling in his power, the astronomer explains that he is “far less happy than before, and nothing but the consciousness of good intention could have enabled me to support the weariness of unremitted vigilance.”

In other words, it might temporarily give us a a good feeling to think we can control the uncontrollable, but if we genuinely live our lives that way, we will suffer mightily as we attempt to change the seasons or divvy up fairly the sunshine and rain among all the nations like the astronomer.

Unlike the Buddha, the astronomer fails to learn the Four Noble Truths or the Middle Way and stays stuck in his delusion of power, causing himself a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Tropical storm Eta will do as it will. I have my supplies, so I’ll hang out at home and live in the moment knowing I can’t control the weather.

However, I’m still going to wear my lucky Gator apparel for the next game.

Photo Courtesy of Michael M on Unsplash

True Love

“All You Need is Love.”

The Beatles

I am not going to offer political commentary because there’s plenty of that already floating around. However, the current political atmosphere makes me want to write about love and suggest that everyone listen to The Beatles because there’s an awful lot of hate.

I’m defining love specifically from a Buddhist perspective, certainly not the chemical cocktail of romance that tends to make us feel crazy. There’s also enough crazy right now.

Buddhism defines true love explicitly. Through practice, we can develop the four aspects of true love: metta (loving-kindness),  karuna (compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy), and upekkha (equanimity). While our brains are wired to do the romantic bad-decision making obsessive romantic love of poetry and song, true love requires a little effort.

Loving-kindness starts with the self. The traditional metta meditation includes phrases along the lines of: May I be (or feel) safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease. These same phrases are then extended out to a mentor, a neutral person, someone who is sometimes called a troublemaker, and finally to the world at large. The idea is to generate an energy of love and kindness that produces a sense of connection with others. Clearly, our culture is failing at this currently.

The other parts of true love spring from loving-kindness.

Compassion builds on metta and on the First Noble Truth, for to feel compassion, we must acknowledge—without fear—the omnipresence of suffering for all beings, including ourselves. We must, in fact, be open to suffering, something that modern culture certainly doesn’t encourage and that we are not inherently prone toward doing. Like metta, compassion must begin with the self since to blame ourselves and carry guilt and shame shuts us down rather than leaving us open.

Joy refers to the ability to rejoice in the happiness and success of others rather than to feel envy. Often when someone we know—or even love—succeeds, we feel threatened rather than truly happy as if happiness were in limited supply and there’s now less of it for us. The joy belonging to true love genuinely celebrates the happiness of others.

True love requires the equanimity that comes from letting go and not attempting to control. Equanimity grows with the acceptance of impermanence and simply being with things as they are in the moment.

I am by no means claiming to have mastered any of this. Like pretty much every other American, I’m struggling with anxiety and communicating with those who clearly don’t share my fundamental beliefs. But I’m practicing, both personally and when teaching.

We’re reading Mansfield Park in my Austen class now. The novel is filled with selfish characters who cause a lot of suffering. One is Mrs. Norris, a character so hateful that J.K. Rowling named Mr. Filch’s spying, disliked cat Mrs. Norris. Austen has no expectations that we like Mrs. Norris, and we should not be okay with her abusive behavior. However, we’ve been talking about how to extend her some true love even as we actively dislike her. If we look closely, we can see that Mrs. Norris is a victim of a culture that valued women as commodities on a marriage market, how this leads her to a life of dependence and insecurity. Sure, she should make different choices and not be so incredibly unkind, but we can extend some love her way even as we don’t excuse her behavior.

Yeah, it’s a lot easier with a fictional character. But research shows that our brains light up when reading in the same way they do when we’re performing real-life tasks. If a character enters a new setting in a novel, the parts of our brains that would process moving into a new room also light up.

So maybe start there. Extend some loving kindness your own way. Then read a good book (I have suggestions!) and practice extending a little love to a fictional character who is a troublemaker. We’ll work our way up to doing it in our daily lives.

Photo Courtesy of Steve HalamaonUnsplash

The Disappeared Door

“Don’t think that happiness will be possible only when conditions around you become perfect. Happiness lies in your own heart.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

You may have noticed there was no new blog entry last week. Life became quite difficult, and I couldn’t manage to write one.

This week, things are slightly calmer—slightly. However, the stress has taken its toll.

Yesterday, I arrived at work for my first class feeling harried. I had too much to do and had received an upsetting phone call on my commute. Because of this, I also was running a few minutes late. I was still early, arriving to my classroom way before the students (as it turned out, the student since only one came in person), and there was no need to panic. I still had time to wipe down surfaces, set up Zoom, and complete all of the new pandemic protocols that have become part of my teaching routine.

But when I went to open the classroom door, it was locked. Slight panic. Just a little. There was still time for pre-class pandemic prep. However, I also needed to make an important phone call before class and required information on my computer and time to do that.

I was logical. Call security. Security unlocks doors. Of course, I couldn’t remember the number for security. Fortunately, our phones are miniature computers, so I googled the number Unfortunately, the reception was terrible, and the page wasn’t loading. “Breathe,” I told myself while I stood in front of that locked door.

As the page loaded and I called security, I looked behind me and remembered that the classroom has two doors. And, yes, as security answered the phone, I was walking into my classroom through the unlocked second door.

I’ve been teaching two classes in that same room all semester. Yet for those couple of minutes, that door had disappeared.

Note that the class I was about to teach is on Jane Austen, and my focus in there is the subject of the book I’ve written, which is the connection I see between Austen and Buddhism. Note also that my students do a mindfulness activity and reflection every week.

The disappeared door made me feel a little like an impostor for a minute or two. Who was I to be teaching these ideas when I can’t even see a door?

Then I realized it’s precisely because of disappearing doors that I needed to teach the class, that I needed the material as much as my students, that it’s a practice, not a destination.

A favorite novel of mine is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. One of the main characters is named Door, and she has the ability to open locked doors through the power of her mind. Doing so drains her, though, so she reaches moments where she no longer can open doors and needs help as she undergoes a perilous journey.

I think I was a bit like a depleted Door yesterday. I can’t magically open doors, but in order to walk through them, I have to see them. If I’m too worn out from life, the door disappears.

As Thich Nhat Hanh teaches, we can’t wait for life to settle down to find peace, calm, and happiness. If so, given the difficulties of daily life currently, we’d be in trouble. Instead, we can see the door and walk through it to find that all of the conditions necessary for our happiness are already and always present.

Photo Courtesy of Philipp Berndt onUnsplash

The Poison of Ignorance and Death Eaters

“After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

According to Buddhism, ignorance is not bliss. It’s one of the three poisons, alongside craving and anger, that leads to suffering. Ignorance refers to not understanding the dharma, meaning the Buddha’s teachings.

The most basic teaching is that initial one of the Buddha: the Four Noble Truths, covered in previous posts. Considering the source of suffering—the second Noble Truth—takes us to the teachings of interbeing (as Thich Nhat Hanh translates it) or interconnectedness and impermanence.

Thich Nhat Hanh uses an analogy from nature to explain. When we look at a tree, we see there is nothing inherently tree about it, not a part that we can separate out and say, that is the essential bit that marks it as a tree. Instead, there are the obvious parts of the tree: roots, trunk, branches, bark, and leaves. They all are parts that come together forming that tree. Yet, beyond those obvious parts of the tree are the other elements of nature necessary for that tree’s existence. The tree has been nurtured by sunshine and water. The water has come from clouds. The rain and the clouds inter-are. The tree relies upon the soil, with all of its nutrients. So the tree consists of roots, trunk, branches, bark, leaves, water, soil, and sunshine. It is all interconnected, and there is no tree without all of those elements.

Another example from nature is a rainbow, which exemplifies the idea of interconnectedness and impermanence. A rainbow exists because of the reflection, refraction, and dispersal of light in water droplets that result in visible colors in an arc in a section of the sky opposite the sun. The rainbow depends on specific weather conditions to manifest, and since those weather conditions will shift, rainbows are temporary sights of beauty.

Buddhists argue that people share these same qualities—that we are manifestations just like a rainbow.

David Barash in his work connecting science and Buddhism, notes that our bodies have ten times as many foreign cells as we do those with our genetic signature; 100 trillion cells, most of which are in our intestines, are microbes from different genomes not produced by our own bodies. That’s some interbeing.

In addition, bits of us die daily as normal and healthy change. On average, the mass of cells that we lose each year to be replaced by new cells equals our body weight. That’s some impermanence!

We aren’t very good at acknowledging that. We stubbornly live our lives as separate beings, refusing to change not wanting to admit that we will die.

I’ll return to Harry Potter for an example from literature showing the damage of such thinking. 

The main antagonist of the series, Lord Voldemort, suffers greatly from the poison of ignorance. Leading a group of wizards called Death Eaters, Lord Voldemort attempts to defy death not caring whom he harms. He refuses, as Buddhists advise, to acknowledge that he is of the nature to grow old, get sick, and die. Rather, he lives a miserable life, much of it barely alive after his first encounter with Harry, trying desperately and ignorantly to defy nature. Along the way, he causes great suffering for everyone since, in order to defy death, he willfully and even gleefully kills along the way.

While our own clinging to wrong ideas of an essential permanent self likely isn’t leading to murderous actions, we can cause great harm to ourselves and others through our ignorance. As parents, we may cling so tightly to that role and our desire to protect our children that we fail to celebrate those changes that inevitably will move them farther away from us. We may refuse to embrace the changing dynamics of a friendship so that we create distance in our attempts to keep things the same. We may identify so strongly with our belief systems that we lose all flexibility when new information arises.

As Lord Voldemort proves, all the magic in the world won’t change the truth of interbeing and impermanence. Our best bet is to mirror Dumbledore, living lives of flexibility, humor, love, acceptance, and knowledge.

Photo Courtesy of Matt Briney on Unsplash

Othello and the Poison of Anger

“Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot / That it do singe yourself.”

William Shakespeare, Henry VII

As described in the last post, the Buddha taught that three poisons lead to suffering: craving, ignorance, and anger.

Anger is an emotion, and there is no such thing as a bad emotion. Emotions range from pleasant to unpleasant but are not good or bad; this is not an issue of moral or immoral. We are human, and we are going to feel the more unpleasant emotions such as sadness, anxiety, envy, and anger. The problem is not the emotion but being unable to recognize that we are experiencing that emotion and in nurturing that emotion so that it comes to be our habitual state.

Anger feels unpleasant in quite literal ways. It can raise our blood pressure, cause us digestive distress, give us headaches, prevent restful sleep, lead to skin problems such as eczema, and, if we are chronically angry, make us vulnerable to heart attacks. In this obvious way, anger really is poisonous. Our body doesn’t like it.

William Shakespeare didn’t need modern medicine to tell him that. His play Othello demonstrates perfectly the poisonous nature of anger.

Written in the early seventeenth century, Othello explores racism, jealousy, and anger. The titular character is a Moor, which we’re reminded of repeatedly as characters often call him the Moor rather than by his name. Othello is a General who has proven his worth in battle to the Venetians, and while serving their cause, meets and secretly marries Desdemona, the daughter of a senator. All of this happens before the play begins.

The first scene introduces us to Iago, Othello’s ensign or flag bearer, who is jealous that another soldier has been promoted ahead of him. Because of his anger, Iago seeks revenge against Othello, using his poisonous words to do the trick.

The word poison is used nine times in the play, though the violence that results from Iago’s revenge plot never comes from poison but from stabbing and strangulation. Rather, the poison is largely metaphorical, resulting from Iago’s attempts to create anger.

In that first scene, Iago manipulates a previous suitor of Desdemona’s to alert her father to the marriage in such a manner as to “poison” Othello’s delight in his newly married state. When called before the senators to defend his marriage, Othello must answer charges of whether he did “subdue and poison” Desdemona to gain her love. Iago admits to his anger “like a poisonous mineral” gnawing at him as well as noting that Othello “already changes with my poison” as he convinces Othello that Desdemona has been unfaithful to him.

Iago succeeds in his revenge by stoking Othello’s insecurity due to the racism surrounding him and by feeding his anger over Desdemona’s supposed adultery. Othello, blinded by his anger, strangles Desdemona in their bed. Afterwards, learning of Iago’s lies, Othello kills himself. Needless to say, as with any Shakespeare tragedy, the body count is high at the end.

I’ve taught this play many times, and I always ask students how they feel about Othello at the conclusion of the play. The bare facts are damning: he believed Iago that his wife cheated on him and killed her without asking for her side of the story.

Perhaps surprisingly, almost all of the students feel compassion for Othello (while thoroughly condemning his actions). Everyone recognizes Iago’s poisonous villainy. I think we also see in Othello how easy it is for any of us to be led astray by anger, how powerful and even seductive anger can be, leading us to spread its poison further.

Again, there is nothing wrong with anger. But if anger takes over, we poison our bodies and spread that to all of those around us. The stakes may not be life and death (though they can be), but when anger pops up, say, “Hi, anger, I see you. I’m going to come over here and give you a big hug of mindfulness so you can go back to where you came from and not cause any harm.”

Or quote some Shakespeare if you prefer.

Photo Courtesy of Jessica Pamp on Unsplash

The Three Poisons Craving and The Great British Baking Show

Mel: This week it’s all about stressed.

Sue: Stressed?

Mel: “Desserts” backwards

According to Buddhism, there are three poisons that produce suffering: ignorance, anger, and craving, and craving makes me think of The Great British Baking Show.

If you’re not familiar with it, GBBS (or The Great British Bake Off as it’s called in England) is a baking contest featuring 12 contestants who each week face three challenges with one voted off and one voted Star Baker at the end of every episode. The finale features three bakers vying for the title of best amateur baker in Britain.

I’m not a fan of reality TV in general or in these kinds of competitions that involve a lot of personal judging. I can’t stand watching humiliation and get anxious on behalf of the participants.

However, GBBS is different, particularly so in those earlier seasons featuring original judge Mary Berry. While Mary didn’t hold back with fair criticism, she was kinder than co-judge Paul Hollywood, who clearly is coached to be the tough one. Even when, on occasion, Paul crossed the line with being harsh, it was never too uncomfortable with hosts Mel and Sue (and later Noel and Sandi), teasing him and he with good nature taking their ribbing.

The true stars are the contestants who dazzle with their creativity and make me wish I could hang out in a pub with them based on how supportive they are of each other.

And that is why I love the show. There is a sweetness (punny) to it.

But there is craving too—and not only for those amazing baked goods, though certainly I often do crave those gorgeous masterpieces.

Alas, because it is a competition, our contestants sometimes allow themselves to be poisoned by craving.

Craving means wanting and needing things to be different. Rather than being okay with the present moment as it is, no matter what that moment may be, craving means we’re longing for something else, not appreciating what we have. Usually what we crave are the very things that won’t make us happy.

The obvious analogy is that we as a species evolved to prefer sweets because they were less likely to be poisonous, but that craving now means we would prefer all of the cookies, cakes, and pies of GBBS over the healthy apple sitting on our counter that is both sweet and healthy. There’s nothing wrong with eating pie. In fact, go ahead. But if we expend all of our energy on craving that pie, we end up focusing on what we don’t have so that we focus on what we lack.

Thich Nhat Hanh assures us that no matter what we can find something in the present moment for which we can be grateful and, thereby, find happiness. If nothing else, I can appreciate that my heart is beating. I am alive. Happiness rests in that gratitude not craving the expensive watch that will monitor my heart rate.

Some GBBS contestants suffer from craving. Rather than enjoying the moment of being on the show, they put laser focus on craving the win. The anxiety can become palpable due to craving as contestants hang their heads, cry, or even, as one contestant did (with a look toward the poison of anger) throw his entire dessert into the waste bin because his ice cream melted.

These twelve people have been picked from thousands upon thousands to do the thing they love best on a show that they also clearly love. Certainly, one can see how that would make one stressed (desserts spelled backwards) due to craving victory.

Ultimately, as Mel once reminded a particularly anxious contestant, it’s just cake.   The winners of the prize seem to be the contestants who know that.

We probably are all craving a lot from our pre-pandemic lives now. Me too. So I’m focusing on the gifts as best I can. I drive a lot less. I’m able to exercise more. And recently I baked banana bread and enjoyed every sweet bite.

Photo Courtesy of  Theme Photos on Unsplash

Right Mindfulness and Petite Women Who Kick Butt

“Four ounces can move a thousand pounds.”

Mulan

I once had a student come up to me outside of class and say, “Are you always this tall?” I guess with the change in perspective of standing right next to me rather than sitting in a desk looking up at me, he suddenly became aware that I can shop in the petite section.

Perhaps this is why I’ve always had an affinity for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the series that features Sarah Michelle Gellar (who’s an inch taller than me actually) as a petite young woman able to conquer any and every monster, even if she dies some along the way.

One of my favorite episodes is “Once More with Feeling,” a musical that features a training scene where Buffy blocks everything thrown her way with ease. Here is Right Mindfulness. Buffy is completely in the moment of the training challenge, not worrying about the reason for the training: an enemy she will have to face in order to save everyone yet again.

I was reminded of that scene recently when watching the new Disney adaptation of Mulan featuring another young, small woman who saves the entire empire of China.

Like the original cartoon, Mulan is told she must fulfill her duty, which, as a Chinese woman, means marrying a man selected for her and obeying her husband.

What the adaptation emphasizes, however, is Mulan’s connection to her chi, the life-force that is within everyone and connects everyone and everything. Within her culture, she is meant for domestic duty, but her chi is telling her otherwise. She is a warrior.

This is a burden.

Buffy and Mulan both carry burdens. Buffy’s burden consists of keeping her vampire-slaying skills a secret and, of course, slaying monsters. Mulan carries the weight of keeping secret her identity as a woman, fearing being discovered, and knowing that she is bringing disgrace to her family.

Yet they both stay focused on the moment. They both exercise Right Mindfulness.

Mindfulness does not equate with euphoria. It means tuning in even if battling the enemy.

Sometimes the enemy can be everyday burdens.

As I ran mindfully this morning, no music and tuning into nature as well as my body, feelings, and thoughts, I realized I was tired, angry, and anxious. That’s not comfortable, of course, but that was my reality in that moment. It’s week five of the semester, and I’m feeling some burnout managing this new world of teaching during a pandemic.

Right Mindfulness means that I don’t run from those feelings but rather run with them. I’m saying hi to them, exploring with curiosity what’s going on. By doing so, I can engage the other seven parts of the Eightfold Path and not stay stuck with that chi-blocking negative energy. Right Mindfulness means I can recognize what I’m feeling and be a spiritual warrior.

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, explained that each season’s villain was an external projection of the interior struggles Buffy herself was facing. That meant Buffy got to face her fears, quite literally, directly.

Like Buffy, we can conquer our fears by facing them directly through Right Mindfulness. And don’t worry: every time Buffy died, she came back to life. That’s what facing fears will do, change us so much that we are no longer the same. That’s why it’s scary and important work.

With Right Mindfulness, we can be warriors too.

Photo Courtesy of Violette Filippini on  Unsplash

Harry Potter and the Practice of Right Action

“It is our actions, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

SPOILER ALERT! Go read all of Harry Potter and then come back. I’ll wait.

Headmaster Albus Dumbledore shares this bit of wisdom about choices with Harry after Harry’s encounter with Tom Riddle, who would go on to become the dark wizard Lord Voldemort. Harry is disturbed to realize how much he has in common with Tom: both orphans, both Hogwarts students who think of the school as their true home, and both able to speak Parseltongue, which allows them to communicate with snakes. 

Dumbledore initially tries to reassure Harry of his difference from Tom by pointing to the fact that Harry is a Gryffindor. Harry then confesses that the sorting hat had debated mightily about putting him in Slytherin, Tom’s House and the one from which most of the dark wizards came. 

Deflated, Harry tells Dumbledore that the sorting hat “only put me in Gryffindor because I asked not to go in Slytherin.”

In other words, having learned upon arrival at Hogwarts of the Slytherin reputation for ambitious wizards using any means—including dark magic—to reach their goals, Harry chooses Gryffindor, this in spite of the sorting hat assuring him that he could accomplish great things if put into Slytherin.

(An aside: I am a proud Slytherin. One can be ambitious and know how to work the system fairly, justly, and with kindness to reach goals that benefit not just the self and never use a whiff of dark magic.)

Later in the series, when there’s an attempt to disguise Harry through creating Harry lookalikes via polyjuice potion, the real Harry gives away his identity by using the spell Expelliarmus to disarm rather than trying to kill another wizard who’s attempting to kill him.

Even at the end, Harry vanquishes Lord Voldemort with the Expelliarmus spell. He never uses the killing curse.

Harry consistently chooses Right Action when it matters. (He’s a kid, so he doesn’t always make the right choice, of course. I’m still mad at those kids for accidentally destroying the time turners.) 

Right Action means choosing non-violence to ourselves and others. We have a reverence for life, which Harry exhibits by disarming, not killing. We live in a way that promotes social justice. In the Harry Potter series, we see this in the discrimination against muggles, werewolves, and house elves (among others) with Harry consistently acting on behalf of the oppressed. Right Action also means engaging in Right Speech and Right Mindfulness as well as mindful consumption.

Harry takes the deprivation that he experienced as a child and, rather than become angry or a bully himself, learns empathy. 

We don’t need magic to practice Right Action. 

Start with the self. We have to be nonviolent—kind—to ourselves first. It’s the oxygen mask theory, if you can remember back to when we used to get on airplanes. Give yourself oxygen so that you can offer the oxygen of loving kindness to others. 

Photos Courtesy of Artem Maltsev and B Kon Unsplash

Right Diligence and The Office

“Work smart, not hard.”

Every Teacher Ever

Spoiler Alert Warning: The Office

No show exemplifies Right Diligence quite so much as The Office. I should warn you that spoilers are below. If you haven’t watched The Office, get on that. There are only nine seasons, so I’ll see you back here in a month. Really, you’ll start and not be able to stop.

In season five of The Office, Jim has a new supervisor, Charles, who is a terrible boss. Charles misreads everyone and communicates terribly. It doesn’t help that prankster Jim made a bad first impression on Charles thanks to wearing a tuxedo to work on the day of Charles’s arrival. While Jim loves his jokes, his work is good, but thrown by Charles’s negative judgment (can you say Wrong View?), Jim struggles.

This is the subplot of the “Michael Scott Paper Company” episode where Charles asks Jim for a rundown of his clients. Jim readily agrees—having no idea what Charles is requesting. Jim spends the entire rest of the episode trying to figure out an assignment he doesn’t understand without revealing his ignorance to Charles.

He approaches coworkers Oscar and Kevin and inquires if they know what a rundown is; neither does. Oscar replies with the obvious: why don’t you ask Charles what it is? Jim replies that he can’t because it’s been hours since Charles asked him for the rundown.

Eventually, Jim comes up with something that he hopes resembles a rundown and attempts to give it to Charles. Without looking at it, Charles tells him to fax the rundown to everyone on the distribution list. Once again, Jim has no idea what Charles means, so he faxes it to his dad.

Jim spent the day on a pointless project feeling anxious the entire time because he didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing. He failed at Right Diligence, which is putting our effort and energy into the Right goals. From a Buddhist perspective, Right means seeking enlightenment.

Bear with me, but, to a certain extent, Michael Scott gets that. Michael is clueless and offensive. He runs an office more based on parties (hence the tuxedo) than work. Yet Michael’s branch of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company is the most successful.

I would argue that Michael works smart, not hard. Almost in spite of his attempts to do so rather than because of them, Michael creates an atmosphere where people care about each other, and his apparent incompetence leaves everyone space to do their work, so they do their work.

Michael thinks of his staff as his family. With that as his goal, in spite of all the comedic missteps, he succeeds at weaving a disparate group into a family of sorts.

In many ways, Michael is a model of how not to act, but he serves as an example of Right Diligence.

Studies show, for example, that beyond a certain income level where our needs are met, more money will not make us happier. We simply will want more and perhaps work so much that we miss out on the things in life that are proven to make us happy. Striving for more of the wrong thing leads to unhappiness.

Right Diligence means putting effort into the things that will bring us peace, calm, and happiness. And by feeling peaceful, calm, and happy, we can contribute to the good of all of those around us.

So don’t mimic Michael exactly, but definitely don’t be Charles.

Photos Courtesy of Screenshots from The Office on NBC Photo Gallery

Right Speech — An Essential Skill

“Say only what is well-intended, true, beneficial, timely, expressed without harshness or malice, and — ideally — what is wanted.”

Rick Hanson, Budhha’s Brain

Speak the truth kindly and consistently. That seems straightforward.

My love of advice columns proves that it’s by no means straightforward. Most letter writers are asking how do I tell . . . or do I tell . . . How do I tell my guests not to use the lovely starched cloth napkins I provided at dinner as handkerchiefs (from the Miss Manners column August 27)? Should I tell my friend that her husband flirted with me (every advice column ever)?

What we say matters. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us in Living Buddha, Living Christ that “unmindful speech can kill.”

And though we may have been told when kids that sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me, words can and do hurt.  Our brains process physical and emotional pain in the same area, so hurtful words indeed hurt.

We also evolved as social animals to fear at a primitive level being ostracized from groups since being a part of a group during the Pleistocene era kept us alive.  Anyone who’s ever been the victim of mean girls knows that words isolating us from friendships hurt at a deep level.

Even the nicest words—I love you—can be said with the wrong intention and cause harm. How many abusers tell their victims “I love you” in order to get them to stay in abusive relationships?

So our words matter—a lot. Our intentions behind our words matter—a lot.

My students probably get tired of me telling them all communication is governed by audience and purpose.  I didn’t know much about Buddhism when I started teaching, but that pretty much sums up Right Speech.

Mr. Darcy certainly gets this wrong in Pride and Prejudice in his first proposal. His intent seems pure. He wants Elizabeth to marry him. He starts out okay, proclaiming,  “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” But things quickly degenerate when he proves “not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride” and catalogs the many reasons why this is not a good match for him due to Elizabeth’s “inferiority.” Needless to say, she says no—as she should. 

Darcy’s intentions were muddied by his pride. His overt purpose of offering himself in marriage is marred by his underlying purpose of making sure Elizabeth knows he’s doing her a favor. And, to build upon Hanson’s description above, his words are not (yet) wanted.  At this moment in the story, Elizabeth believes Darcy dislikes her. She’s certainly not ready for a marriage proposal.

Darcy is telling the truth as he sees it, but he’s not engaging in Right Speech.

Right Speech depends on deep listening, something most of us aren’t very good at it, but it’s a skill, and we can learn. Too often in conversation, we are waiting for a break so that we can jump in with our own point, which means we’re listening for that pause, not to what is being said. We can be guilty of treating conversation as competition.

In a democracy, Right Speech and deep listening are crucial—and we currently are terrible at it. But, since it’s a skill, we can get better. I strongly recommend my friend Michael Austin’s book We Must Not Be Enemies. Mike is one of the most insightful thinkers I know and an excellent writer. He’s not talking about Buddhist Right Speech, but he explains why we must engage in civil discourse if democracy is to thrive.

We owe it to each other as family members, friends, and citizens to engage in Right Speech.

Photo Courtesy of Leona Wilde

Right Livelihood and Compassion

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

Martin Luther King Jr.

Right Livelihood is a part of the Eightfold Path that gets less attention than Mindfulness, but it’s been on my mind. Right Livelihood refers to making a living in a way that benefits all—or at the very least does no harm.

An acknowledgement: I write from a place of privilege. I have a job with a comfortable salary and health benefits. I am working in the field for which I trained. I am doing what I’ve wanted to do since I was in my early twenties. I am very fortunate.

I’ve been blessed with being able to engage in Right Livelihood clearly and overtly. I get to teach literature and writing.

Reading literature has proven health benefits. Brain research demonstrates that reading good fiction with attention improves brain health. Plus, it’s fun!

Writing is a powerful tool. What could be more important than being able to express yourself? Writing is necessary in many jobs and can lead to better opportunities at Right Livelihood. Writing also is necessary in a democracy. We need to be able to write to our representatives, to craft petitions, and to express ourselves in public forums to address social issues and enact change. Most importantly, writing is meaning creating and gives us access to our own selves. I’ve been keeping a daily journal for almost a decade.

My values, my ideals, and my goals all align with my work.

However, I teach. I and a lot of my higher education colleagues and my dear friends teaching K-12 are looking at going back into classrooms during a global pandemic. How will we attend to our values, ideals, goals, and safety—not only our safety but that of our students?

Many parents learned to value teachers like never before during school shut downs in the spring when we found ourselves essentially homeschooling.

That appreciation extended to essential workers but maybe less so now.

I read an article recently in The Washington Post where grocery store employees around the country discussed how they felt valued as never before during the spring. Customers thanked them for their work. Now, however, workers are experiencing terrible burnout from facing crowds of customers who refuse to wear masks (or wear them properly). Employees in minimum-wage jobs suddenly find themselves having to confront angry shoppers, some of whom have threatened or even committed acts of violence when asked to wear masks.

Key to Buddhism are empathy and compassion. Empathy means being able to enter into the feelings of others, and, from there, we can feel compassion, genuinely wishing people happiness.

No matter what our jobs, we have the opportunity to practice empathy and compassion. Recently, an elderly friend of mine went to the grocery store after running another errand. She has several health problems, and it proved too much activity. When she was checking out, the cashier came around to her, took her by the arm, and led her to a chair, telling her that her color was off and she needed to sit while the cashier took care of things. She and a bagger made sure to get my friend to the car and loaded her groceries for her. Not only did they help my friend in the moment, but she felt cared for and looked after in ways that benefited her emotionally for a long period after.

The pandemic seems to be bringing out our worst and our best selves. We can approach Right Livelihood with empathy and compassion. We can value workers who are struggling with a hostile public, with anxiety about the safety of working conditions, and with the stress of working at home while trying to raise a family.

The path to ending suffering is not a solo one. Enlightenment doesn’t come from from getting the perfect job that makes the individual happy. Right Livelihood is of benefit to all.

Photo Courtesy of Anshu A from Unsplash

Right Thinking and the Problem of Cow Paths

“That is why I don’t believe much in what Mr. Descartes said: ‘I think, therefore I am.’

I think, therefore I’m lost in my thinking. I’m not there.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

I am an over thinker. I once had a friend say to me that it must be really tiring to be you after I explained my process for making a simple decision. He was right.

I also found myself saying, “Shut up!” when all alone for days at Cayo Costa, a coastal camping site. I was tired of my brain’s constant chatter.

With all that thinking, I tend to get lost in thought. I once missed a flip turn when swimming because I was thinking about David Hume. Yes, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher was on my mind instead of that wall I was about to swim into.

If Descartes is right, and I think, therefore I am, then I really AM!

Fortunately, these incidents were a few years back, and thanks to cultivating mindfulness, I’m a little more present these days.

Present is the key term. Often enough, like me in the pool, our minds and bodies are not really in the same space. It’s why we can’t find our keys. We didn’t pay attention to where we put them in the first place.

So Right Thinking starts with being present and not only thinking. When you swim, be there in the pool, not thinking about the honors class you’re going to teach later that day.

Right Thinking also means not responding from habit energy. We all have habits, good and bad, and habits are useful, like brushing our teeth. We need to do that at least twice a day, and since we have been our whole lives, we do it automatically. However, we don’t want to do it too automatically. We actually want to pay attention when we brush our teeth. We can practice being present.

Being present and not completely caught by our thoughts is important because our brains get wired for habitual thinking.

I learned the term cow paths when attending the University of Florida. It’s a big campus with a lot of green space and sidewalks, but there would be areas in the grass that were worn down, not official paths but places that had been traversed so frequently they had become path-like. Apparently, cows trace their steps over and over forming cow paths just like Gator students, hence cow paths.

Our brains work like that too. We develop neural connections from having the same reactions and thoughts over and over. This is clearly bad when the thoughts themselves are damaging such as those we experience due to trauma. But even innocuous habitual thoughts can be a problem. The cow-paths in our brains often mean that we respond automatically rather than to what is actually happening in the here and now right in front of us.

When we’re not present and responding to the present, we get things wrong, and we also are not responsive within our relationships.

Social psychologist Ellen Langer suggests that when we are with a loved one that we consciously notice something different about that person and then share what we’ve noticed. This makes a person feel truly seen and improves our relationships.

Right Thinking means we can recognize habit energy, not respond to it automatically, be fully present in the moment, and connect better with others.

When we recognize the way our minds are constantly narrating our lives, we can pause and decide to live our lives. Do it with compassion, though. Say, “hey habit energy, let’s get back to it,” unlike my frustrated “shut up” to myself.

In this way, we awaken bodhichitta, or the mind of love, and we can produce happiness for ourselves and others.

Photo Courtesy of Leona Wilde

Getting Right View Wrong

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!” 

Jane Austen, Persuasion

When it comes to the Eightfold Path, we don’t master the first step and then move on to the next. They are interconnected. For the sake of understanding, though, let’s revisit just one: Right View.

To review, Right View refers to what we perceive and how we perceive it. We all take in the world through our senses, but we process information differently. Right means wholesome, as in I’m not causing suffering for myself or others.

Remember the dress incident in 2015? Some people saw a dress that was white and gold, others blue and black when they looked at the same photo. The linked 2017 article explains these differing views. It turns out that some of us are larks (early morning risers) and experience more natural light, whereas owls, (late to bed and late to rise) are exposed to more incandescent light. Being a lark or an owl made the brain fill in all sorts of blanks when seeing the picture, and those of us who are larks saw the dress wrong. Yep, it’s gold and white for me because sleeping late for me is 7:30 am at the latest. But that original dress is black and blue. I can’t see it.

Another great example is a study of radiologistswho were told to review x-rays of lungs for cancerous nodules. The x-rays included a superimposed picture of a gorilla, and 83 percent of radiologists missed it because they were primed to look for those much-harder-to-see cancerous nodules. We see what we are looking for.

This is why Thich Nhat Hanh suggests asking ourselves frequently, “Are you sure?”

In the case of the radiologists, the suffering that might result is obvious. The attention bias could lead to missing a different medical problem than the one they were so intent on looking for.

At a more mundane level, the kind of suffering that results from the dress differences can mean a kind of chronic suffering that adds up over time. When we forget that we are operating from a perspective and could be wrong, we are more likely to be unnecessarily self righteous and more divisive. Such thinking creates ill will, defensiveness, and boundaries.

Jane Austen certainly understood this. For example, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s initial opinion of Darcy comes from his slighting her at a dance. He was rude. She’s not wrong. But she’s unable to see him any differently afterwards for much of the novel, leading to her then getting things wrong—like being totally shocked when he proposes because she thought he disliked her!

The Eightfold Path is a practice. To practice Right View, pause, remember that you are operating from a perspective, ask are you sure, and consider how your own bias may be operating.

Photo Courtesy of Leona Wilde

The Fourth Noble Truth

“If we live according to the Noble Eightfold Path, we cultivate well-being and our life will be filled with joy, ease, and wonder.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Budhha’s Teaching

The Buddha devoted his teachings to the causes and cure for suffering.

The First Noble Truth is that life contains suffering. This is important because it means we don’t live our lives waiting for everything to be perfect; we understand it never will be perfect (whatever perfect means for you).

The Second Noble Truth is that we can understand the causes of our suffering. This implies that we can understand what causes happiness.

And since we can understand the causes of suffering and happiness, the Third Noble Truth assures us that we can end our suffering and encourage happiness.

The Fourth Noble Truth tells us how: the Eightfold Path, which consists of Right View, Right Thinking, Right Mindfulness, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Diligence, Right Concentration, and Right Livelihood. 

Before defining each, note that “right” doesn’t mean right versus wrong in a fixed, doctrinal manner. Buddhism rests in practice and experience. There is not a set of rules that you can follow consistently that will end your suffering but rather a practice that you can bring into your everyday experience to prevent you from creating suffering.

Right View does this through teaching us to recognize that everything we believe or know is a matter of perception and that we often misperceive. For example, going back to wanting that perfect life, we often get trapped by ideas of what will make us happy, striving for whatever that may be—only to find upon getting that condition for happiness that it wasn’t so great after all. As a Ph.D. student who had to take doctoral exams, for nine months, I studied knowing that happiness lay on the other side of passing those exams. Truthfully, it was anticlimactic to pass, and what lay on the other side was writing a dissertation.

Right Thinking connects to Right View because if we are failing to perceive things correctly, we certainly aren’t going to think about them correctly. The real problem we mostly have is overthinking. (Guilty!) Via multitasking especially, we are rarely present in the moment. Much of our thinking comes from habit energy. We respond to the past rather than the present moment. Thich Nhat Hanh advises always asking, “Are you sure?” I wrote that down on a piece of paper and taped it to my bedroom door as a reminder.

That brings us to Right Mindfulness, in which we are open and present to whatever comes up in the moment. Since we tend to want to feel good and avoid uncomfortable sensations, we aren’t naturally good at this. But with mindfulness, we learn to be with our unpleasant emotions. If you feel anger, embrace it mindfully acknowledging its presence. Doing so means that the anger isn’t unconsciously controlling you but that you are aware of the anger, which allows it to subside.

Right Speech means being consistently honest, but, perhaps more importantly, Right Speech includes deep listening. So often when we have a conversation, our attention is on the next thing we want to say rather than giving our full attention to the person speaking. If it’s an intense conversation, we may feel defensive or consider how to justify ourselves. Allowing someone to truly feel heard, though, immediately reduces that person’s suffering. Nothing else needs to occur, no change in circumstances. When someone feels truly heard, she feels understood and suffers less. And it would be cool if we could do that for each other out of the wish to alleviate suffering so that fewer people had to pay $130 per hour to get a professional to listen.

Right Action means being nonviolent to others as well as to ourselves. We show a reverence for life and live in ways that promote social justice. An example is consuming mindfully. We can purchase from thrift stores or buy new clothing made from recycled goods.

Right Diligence refers to effort brought to the practice. Again, you can’t memorize a bunch of precepts or rules and find happiness. If you want to perform great in your piano recital, you practice. If you want to cultivate a life of less suffering, you bring energy and effort to the practice. But, like playing the piano, the effort feels good, not aversive. The effort itself is rewarding.

With Right Concentration, we fully focus on an object of attention. In meditation, for example, we bring our concentration to a specific object, often our breath. Mindfulness allows us to see when our attention goes elsewhere so that we can return our concentration to the breath (or whatever the object of concentration may be).

Lastly, Right Livelihood consists of choosing work that doesn’t compromise the ideals of love and compassion. That does not mean we all must quit our jobs and become monastics, but we want to engage in work that is in accordance with our values.

Obviously, the path to happiness deserves more than a short blog post, so please consider this an introduction. I’ll be coming back to these ideas later. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment letting me know what you’d like to see developed.

Wishing you happiness!

Photo Courtesy of Leona Wilde

The Story of the Buddha and the Third Noble Truth

“It is good to tame the mind, which is difficult to hold in and flighty, rushing wherever it listeth; a tamed mind brings happiness.”

Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada

Buddhism is a non-theistic religion. The Buddha is not a god to be worshiped. He was a man who reached enlightenment and shared this knowledge with disciples.

He began life as Siddhartha Gautama 2,600 years ago, an Indian prince whose father protected him from all suffering. Eventually, though, Siddhartha witnessed human suffering firsthand. He consequently renounced wealth and went in search of enlightenment, leaving the palace to join ascetics on his quest. After many years of difficult practice, the Buddha failed to achieve enlightenment. He left his fellow ascetics, eventually meditating under the Bodhi Tree where he understood the origin and cure for suffering: the Four Noble Truths.

As previously mentioned, the First Noble Truth is that life contains suffering. The Second is that we can trace the causes of suffering. The Third Noble Truth is that we can end our suffering.

Like Jesus, the Buddha told stories and used analogies to explain enlightenment. One of the best known involves being shot by an arrow.

Imagine being shot by an arrow. It would hurt, right? That’s pain.

Now imagine being shot in the same place by a second arrow. That would really hurt, right? That’s suffering.

We do this to ourselves all the time.

Here’s a ridiculous example from my own life.

A few days ago, as I was putting away groceries, a full bottle of kombucha fell off of the top shelf of the refrigerator onto the tile floor. It shattered. I was barefoot. I tiptoed out of the kitchen and put on my pink Croc sandals before heading back into the kitchen to deal with the mess. Later, the ball of my right foot hurt. This is all first arrow stuff. There was a bottle that fell, shattered, and made a mess. I cleaned up, and I noticed some pain later.

Here’s the second arrow. My foot would hurt, and I would think, what if there’s glass in there? Could there be a tiny piece of embedded glass? If there is, how will I get it out? If I can’t, I guess I could go to urgent care. But I live in Florida where COVID-19 cases are skyrocketing, and I don’t want to go to urgent care. What if I got COVID-19 from going to urgent care? Okay, I won’t go, but what if my foot gets infected? Does this mean I won’t be able to run? I mean even if there’s no glass in there, what if my foot still hurts tomorrow? I don’t want to miss a day of running. That would be awful!

I’m happy to say that I didn’t (but in the past, I’m pretty sure I would have) add in various blaming insults to myself about being stupid to have allowed the bottle to drop in the first place.

That’s all second arrow suffering—minor suffering for sure—but if I’d already been anxious, maybe about something like a global pandemic, it may have been enough to make me truly suffer. And it came from my story, not from the shattered bottle.

Because the Buddha was a man, not a god, I have the same potential within me to end suffering that he had.

Therefore, thanks to mindfulness, I was able to pull back and see how I was making myself suffer unnecessarily and to stop telling that story.

And that’s the way out of suffering: stop telling the story. We do that through the Fourth Noble Truth, which I’ll explain more in depth in the next post.

Photo Courtesy of Leona Wilde

The Story of Anxiety

“What makes us suffer is the way we think about what’s happening.”

Pema Chodron, No Time to Lose

As noted in the previous post, anxiety causes suffering and is also an important psychological adaptation. We all experience anxiety.

But we don’t all experience it the same way or for the same reasons.

The pandemic serves as a perfect example.

Some of us tune into the news, see the number of new cases, and feel anxiety ranging from extreme to enough anxiety that we stay home as much as possible and consistently wear masks wherever we go. The thought of schools reopening might cause stomach distress, sweaty palms, and extreme physical discomfort.

Some of us look at the exact same data and live our lives as normal, not wearing a mask unless required by law, getting those haircuts, going to bars, and eating at restaurants.

We can all be looking at the same information but react differently because we create different stories.

We’re no different from our early ancestors who heard the rustling in the bushes and created a story that determined the next step. That’s a lion! Or that’s a bunny. Sometimes, it was a lion, and our ancestor was smart to go with that story. Sometimes, it was only a bunny, and our ancestor caused himself unnecessary panic. Anxiety is an adaptation because lion stories meant survival of the species. Better to be wrong about bunnies and never wrong about lions.

It doesn’t have be anything as drastic as a pandemic or a lion though. Each of us has something that makes us anxious that might not make sense to anyone else. I was once in a small yoga class where a student asked before we started that everyone line up their yoga mats because the random placement of the mats was making her anxious. I hadn’t even noticed. As for me, I’m grateful for the invention of GPS because the idea of getting lost makes me anxious. (Yes, I know; I get lost using GPS too. Anxiety doesn’t always make sense. See yoga mat example.)

There’s all the stuff that happens on a given day, and there’s the story about it that becomes our reality and has the possibility of making us happy or anxious or something in between.

Alison Wood Brooks is a Harvard business professor whose experiments on performance anxiety demonstrate this. The physiological symptoms of anxiety are very similar to those of excitement; if we choose to label the physical symptoms as excitement, we shift the narrative, and our working memory is no longer encumbered by anxiety. Rather, we are excited and ready to perform. Nothing has changed except for the explanation we offer ourselves.

Again, the First Noble Truth is that life contains suffering. The Five Remembrances Meditation deals with this: I am of the nature to get sick, grow old, and die. So is everyone whom I love. The only thing that truly belongs to me are my actions. We can’t escape these truths.

However, the Second Noble Truth reminds us that we can discover the cause of suffering. We can look behind the suffering and find its cause, the story we’re creating.

The Five Remembrances entered forcefully into my own life through my mother’s slowly progressive dementia. It was a dozen years from the time of seeing first signs of it to the time of her death. Because I thought of her as my lifelong best friend, my initial story around her dementia was incredible fear, loss, anger, and lack of acceptance. It hurt my relationship with her. I struggled being around her. I couldn’t accept who she was.

As she got worse, I was able to change my story. She was still high functioning at the time of her death, and every visit to her was the highlight of my day because I could enjoy her beautiful smile, her enthusiasm to see me, and her genuine expression of pure love.

When she asked me the same question 10 times in an hour on first diagnosis, I wanted to pull my hair out. When she asked me the same question 20 times in an hour after she got worse, it didn’t bother me at all. She was worse, but I’d changed my story.

It was painful to lose my mom, but I’m glad I stopped creating suffering for both of us and could appreciate her for who she was in the moment. I’d never felt closer to her than when she died last August.

Stories are powerful, including the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell others, and the ones we read.

Jane Austen knew that.

So does Buddhism, which will be the subject of the next post

Photo Courtesy of Leona Wilde

“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is truly optional.”

Sister Dang Nghiem, Mindfulness as Medicine: A Story of Healing Body and Spirit

Why Jane Austen and the Buddha instead of Austen and mindfulness?

After all, mindfulness is the buzzword today. Think of all of the magazine covers touting mindfulness staring at you in the checkout line of the grocery store (back when we all went to the store like it was nothing).

Mindfulness can be hard to do but is actually simple: be present in the here and now. That here and now could be (as it is for me currently) sitting on the couch, writing on my laptop, and drinking coffee, a neutral feeling verging on pleasant. Or it could be mile 22 of a marathon (which I’ve managed a few times): grueling, painful, and enough to make me question my sanity.

Mindfulness, therefore, does not necessarily mean bliss. However, science tells us that mindfulness can help us to regulate our emotions, leading to more peace and happiness, something the Buddha discovered thousands of years earlier.

While mindfulness is completely secular, it is a key component to Buddhism, but there’s more to Buddhism than mindfulness, hence Austen and the Buddha.

Mindfulness has become trendy and in danger of being marketed to us by companies as a cure all in the same way that all of those face creams are supposed to keep me from looking like I’m getting old. Yet mindfulness isn’t an escape from reality in Buddhism nor for Austen.

Rather, mindfulness trains us to be in that moment of joy, love, fear, or pain. And pain is inevitable in life.

Buddhist psychology makes clear that we are powerless to escape pain just as an Austen heroine is powerless to propose or to choose a career. We are of the nature to get sick (as the headlines remind us of daily), age, and die.

What we can do is understand the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha’s first and most central teaching. Suffering is inevitable. We must discover the cause of our suffering. We can end our suffering. We end it via the Noble Eightfold Path: Right View, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Diligence, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

In other words, we inevitably will face pain as human beings, but we need not add to it through all of the stories that we create around that pain. That is suffering.

Austen understood this. Elizabeth Bennet creates her own suffering through holding onto a grudge. Emma Woodhouse’s misreading and desire to be a matchmaker make for much suffering.

Like the Buddha, Austen saw that suffering was part of everyday experience. Her own lived experience of being a single woman without a lot of money in a patriarchal culture proved that. She didn’t need to write a War and Peace to explore suffering but could depict life in a village to show how we humans contribute to our own misery, making her stories ones we can still relate to centuries later.

She also, as the Buddha did, could see that the suffering of one creates suffering for others and, importantly, that suffering can be transcended as we see in her last complete novel, Persuasion.

Up next, we’ll explore the most prevalent form of suffering in our time—anxiety—and how it connects to narrative, that is, the stories we tell ourselves.

Austen, the Buddha, Reading, and Me

Ever since I learned to read, I’ve read constantly. I mean constantly, as in while brushing my teeth or doing my hair constantly. My parents had to tell me to put the book down at the dinner table. I used to climb the pine trees to reach the roof of what we called the clubhouse in our backyard and read there to avoid disturbance.

I read my first adult novel in fifth grade as a result of positive peer pressure. All the girls were reading Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. I’m pretty sure that none of us fully understood it, but we all read it.

I moved on to romances, liking historical ones best, and seventh grade introduced me to Charles Dickens. I was hooked by A Tale of Two Cities, becoming unabashedly an Anglophile devouring British novels, preferably centuries old, ever since. (I later would name my pets Pip, Oliver, Charlie, Rose, and Fezziwig in Dickens’ honor.)

Inevitably, I became an English professor specializing in British literature. I tried to avoid that fate (who wants to go to school another six years?) by majoring in journalism, but I washed out as a business reporter after five months, quitting because no 22 year old should awaken every day filed with dread. As miserable as I was, probably because I was miserable, I still read–a lot–even increasing my misery with reading Sophie’s Choice, for example, and sobbing. I was like the young Ebenezer Scrooge at boarding school in A Christmas Carol where Robinson Crusoe and Aladdin became his friends during a sad and lonely time. Books were my friends and comforters.

I don’t remember when I first read Jane Austen. I know it was Pride and Prejudice (of course), and it was for fun. I was in love. It was romance, historical, and British filled with humor that I somehow got as a twentieth-century American girl reading on her own. This was before the Austen resurgence where seemingly every year produced another Austen film adaptation. I knew her through words on the page only, and I read all of her novels.

I’m also an avid re-reader. I’ve decided this is because I’m an anxious reader. Characters become so alive for me that I can’t wait to find out what will happen next, so I zoom hurriedly through books, reading for plot, always dreading the end of a good book because it feels like parting with a friend yet rushing to finish, needing to know what happens next. Then I reread if the book is good because I want to see how the author did it. So I read for who and what, reread for how and why. I’ve read most of Dickens’ work more than once and all of Austen’s major novels more times than I can count. Really. I hesitate even to hazard a guess.

I think this anxious reading style of mine also explains my attraction to Austen. Her work is soothing. Pick up Pride and Prejudice for the first time knowing nothing of it, and a reader still feels reassured all will be well. The proper characters will pair off correctly. That amazing, reassuring Austen narrative voice makes clear that even if in reality there’s no way Elizabeth Bennet gets Darcy, Austen has created a world where she will–and his £10,000.

Yet I reached a point in my life as an English professor where I could not read any fiction for pleasure. I’d settled strictly into re-reading, finishing the Harry Potter series and immediately going back to the first book more than once. Eventually, I couldn’t even manage that. I’d start a book, never get very far, and quit. This was completely unlike me. In the past, even if I didn’t like a book, I finished it because it bothered me not knowing what happened. There were very few books I’d not finished in my life. This was entirely new territory for me.

The reason for this is that I was facing more than one major personal crisis. My mother was suffering from slowly progressive dementia. As she got worse, I found myself at a loss on how to help her from four hours away, especially since she would not accept my help. My marriage was failing in similarly slowly progressive fashion. It’s not so much that it was slowly getting worse because it had been painful for a long while but that slowly I was moving toward the unavoidable conclusion that I would have to leave, a prospect made much worse because it meant giving up half custody of my young daughter. I think I was so overloaded on personal anxiety that there was no room in my psyche for the problems of fictional friends, even those I knew well such as Emma, Elinor, and Elizabeth who all got their happy endings. It was too much.

Eventually, I could read one book: Austen’s Persuasion. I would finish it and start over again. It was the only novel I read through completely (other than books required for work) for more than a year. Austen makes sense given what I noted above about anxiety. Her reassuring, carefully constructed worlds produce enough dramatic tension for pleasure, not too much for anxiety. Yet, of all of her books, Persuasion seems the least likely candidate as the one book I could read during this difficult point in my life. It is the least comedic and contains the most hazard.

 As part of the process of working through my personal pain, I started reading about Buddhism, drawn to these ideas because the heart of the Buddha’s teachings is suffering, its sources, and the ability to transcend it. Fiction, in the past, allowed me to escape my own suffering by entering into the world (and heads) of others. Buddhism, with its emphasis on practice, gave me not an escape but a tool to cope with suffering.

Buddhism, Persuasion, and heartbreak all came together after my divorce when I took (bear with me) a buzzfeed quiz asking which Jane Austen heroine are you. The answer was Anne Elliot from Persuasion. What? I should be Elizabeth Bennet! I’m hilarious, known for my wit. I retook it: Anne. I took it four times, and every time it was Anne. It all came together. Of course I’m Anne, for Anne is, of all Austen’s characters, the most long suffering and most loyal, holding onto her love for Wentworth just as I had in staying in a marriage no longer working. And then I knew: I read and reread Persuasion alongside Buddhism because it is a novel about suffering. In fact, all of Austen’s novels, even the most comedic, are about suffering, and the successful heroines are those who cope with their suffering in Buddhist fashion.

I’m not saying Austen was a Buddhist, and I’m not Buddhist either. Truthfully, I’m a spiritual mutt. The great religions share at their core a central message of love. I’m uninterested in doctrine and fascinated with religious teachings on love from Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity as well as Buddhism. The path to peace for me has been Buddhism in all likelihood because the brand of Buddhism I’ve read comes from those more interested in the practice of mindfulness and transcending suffering than on doctrine. For me, that has been Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Charlotte Joko Beck, and Pema Chodron.

Finding myself at the intersection of Austen, Buddhism, and our anxious times, I wish to offer insight into suffering in the very humble hope that I may contribute to alleviating suffering for at least one person.