September 11, 2011

Ten years. Wow. I was there when it happened. Here's my story, originally posted on another blog of mine back in 2006:

" I have a deeper connection to the attacks than most because I was there. I worked a block away from the Trade Center and stuck around long enough to get immersed in the mayhem and have to run for my life up Church Street when the towers collapsed.

“On the morning of September 11, 2001 I and a number of other newly hired City attorneys were due to have our picture taken with then Mayor Rudy Giuliani on the steps of City Hall. We were all supposed to meet on the second floor of the Law Department and then proceed to City Hall as a group. I was running late that morning and didn’t get to 100 Church Street until shortly after 8:30am. The first plane must have struck the tower when I was in the elevator because I don’t recall hearing any explosion. When I arrived on the second floor, I was somewhat surprised that no one else was there yet. Apparently the folks who were on the floor at the time the first plane hit had immediately gone downstairs to see what was happening. I grabbed a co-worker and went back to the lobby of my building. As I was pushing through the front door of the building to go out into the street, the second plane hit the tower. There was a tremendous explosion and flash of light reflected in the windows of the building across the street which promptly shattered due to the explosion. A piece of the plane’s engine (I could see the flywheel clearly) tore through a section of roof of the next building north of 100 Church and landed with a tremendous thud about 20 yards from where I was standing. It was still there, smoking, when I ran up Church Street later on that morning.

Immediately after the second plane hit I bolted back into the lobby which was already full of FBI agents who were screaming at everyone to evacuate the building because it was about to collapse. For the first time that day, but not the last, I sincerely thought that I was about to die. At this point I still didn’t know what had happened; my first thought was that someone had blown up the Federal building next door. That was true terror-not knowing if a bomb was going to obliterate you at any second. I have never felt such mindless instinctual fear in my entire life.

It was only when I exited the lobby into the street that I saw the towers burning for the first time. Instead of leaving the area immediately as many of my colleagues did, I bummed a cigarette from a co-worker and stood in front of my building watching the buildings burn. I saw  many people jumping to their deaths from the holes where the planes went in. Fortunately, the Federal building blocked any view of them landing. The streets were full of paper blowing from the Trade Center offices like it was a perverse ticker-tape parade. Fire trucks and police cars were racing downtown in the direction of the towers. I have often wondered over the years how many of those young firefighters I saw hanging on their trucks on their way to rescue people were killed that day.

There were a lot of people gathered on Church Street and Park Place. The rumor mill was grinding out information every second; there was a third plane, the Met Life Building had also been hit, etc. It was a pretty chaotic scene. At some point before the first Tower collapsed a fighter jet appeared in the sky and looped around the Towers. I was pretty relieved to see him but his presence started a minor panic because people initially thought it was another hijacked plane. Any time something set off the crowd, small groups of people would start running and that turned into a stampede. Being in that crowd was like being in a herd of very confused animals. No one knew what to do or where to go.

When the first Tower collapsed I was standing on the corner of Church Street and Chambers Street. There was a loud rumbling sound, like thunder,  and I ran for my life up Church Street with other New Yorkers as the cloud of smoke and debris came racing towards me. For the second time that day I thought I was a goner. I got dusted up pretty good and ended up throwing out my suit a little while later because I could never get that smell out. If you were downtown at all in the aftermath of the attacks you know what smell I'm talking about. It was the smell of death; burning plastic, human bodies, wood, paper. I'd imagine hell must smell something like that. I will never forget that smell.

I was much further away when the second tower collapsed; I was standing in a parking lot on Canal Street staring downtown and I could only see the top of the building as it disappeared. I then walked home to my apartment in Brooklyn in silence with thousands of others. I had 10 cents in my pocket and no way to get any money because the ATM networks were down. The bars in Greenpoint extended credit generously and I spent the better part of that night drinking beer and shaking like a leaf.

We were shut out of our building for eight months as it was inside the frozen zone. We returned in April of 2002. Meanwhile life changed for me and for everyone else in the world. Anyway that’s the outline of my story. Hopefully many of you were a lot further away and only had to watch it on TV because, frankly I have had a difficult time processing all of that destruction."

Seasons End, Roses Die

Today is the day after Labor Day and kids all over the United States are heading back to school. It was rainy and cool this morning, in marked contrast to the humidity and heat we’ve had the past few days. It was almost as if the earth was providing a seasonally appropriate backdrop for the onset of fall. The weather put a little bit of a chill on my own mood as I headed out in the dark to catch my train. This summer seemed so incredibly brief and I had gotten so used to the long days and relaxed work schedule that I have already started to view the approaching autumn with some trepidation.

This is ludicrous, of course. I can no more influence the change of the seasons than I can the movement of the tides, so feeling melancholy about one changing into another is as pointless as it is ineffective. Still, the mind stretches out to its wants and desires and tries to gather the world onto itself. I watch it happen without getting attached to the feelings. Yesterday I blew the dust off the snow shovel and moved it to a more prominent location in the garage.

Some Thoughts on Osama and 9-11

On Sunday while a US Navy Seal team was preparing to send Osama Bin Laden on his final mission, Erin and I rode in the annual Five Boro Bike Tour, a 42 mile pedal through the City of New York. The tour started in Battery Park, although cyclists lined up as far north as Canal Street. Although the weather was picture perfect, I still felt a chill when we rode past my old office building at 100 Church Street, a block away from the World Trade Center site. That’s where I was working on September 11, when 19 Saudi terrorists came within 20 yards of ending my life during my first week as an attorney for the City of New York’s Office of the Corporation Counsel. I pointed out to Erin the spot in the roadway on Church Street where a big piece of engine from UA 175 landed uncomfortably close to where I was standing that morning. I found a picture of it on the internet today; the first time I have seen it since 9/11/01.

 911 was on my mind all day yesterday. It always seems to rise to the fore of my consciousness whenever I spend any protracted time in Manhattan. From 2001-2004 it was pretty much on my mind constantly. No amount of zazen or consideration of the relative nature of existence could help me make sense of the vents of that day. It took a long time, but I eventually came to terms. I was pretty angry for a while. Fortunately,  in addition to being a Buddhist, I am also a tough, stubborn New Yorker,. It took the better part of three years along with countless gallons of wine and a fair amount of psychotherapy to get to the point where I was even prepared to deal with with the immensity of what I saw go down right in front of my face. I'd say I started to thaw out long after lower Manhattan had been sanitized for the tour buses. 

All in all I think I’ve done a fair job of integrating all that fear and anger about that day into my life better than a lot of people who weren’t even there, if my countrymen’s reaction to the death of Osama Bin Laden is any indication. Eventually I was able to process the nasty stuff, in no small part thanks to a few years on the cushion and the growing realization that I needed to change the way my body/mind related to the event itself. Anger is an incredibly destructive emotion. I didn't start to get better until I embraced my own anger and let it go. It wasn't easy. I suspect that all the super-patriotic flag waving and blood-lust going on in the Country since Bin Laden was killed reflects the fact that a lot of people are still very angry. The anger is inchoate though; unfocused. We think its Osama that we're angry about, but it goes deeper than that. The attacks on the World Trade Center changed our lives, and demolished our sense of security. Whether Osama Bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center, and the facts on that are far from conclusive, he became a living representation of evil and the target of 350 million people's anger.

Newscasters and commentators like to talk about the “shared experience” of 911, but forgive me for always feeling that there was a big difference between watching that mayhem on television in Ohio and standing a block away from people who were jumping to their deaths from the jagged fiery holes left by the jet liners. Watching the Towers fall from the comfort of your living room is an entirely different experience from running up Church Street as they start to fall on top of your head. In the days after the attacks I wanted to rip Osama Bin Laden's head off and carry it around lower Manhattan. After a few weeks though, I realized that I had no interest in flag waving and less interest in revenge. I, like many other New Yorkers, just wanted my life back. If you've spent any time studying Buddhism, you realize how futile a desire that is. Maybe that's why we're all still so angry; we want our lives back. Our safety. Our security. Deep down though, we all know it ain't gonna happen.

Yesterday morning when woke up to the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, I initially had no reaction whatsoever. I simply didn’t know how to process the information. Shortly thereafter I realized that for the first time in many years I was thinking about September 11 constantly.  On the surface, Osama's death changes nothing whereas 911 changed everything. Warrantless  wiretaps, the Patriot Act, Drone attacks, two wars in the Middle East, the TSA, etc. We aren’t the same country we used to be. As a lawyer I know what the last ten years of legislation passed out of fear and anger has done to the Constitution. In terms of our civil rights and  damage to the rule of law, we may never recover. That alone is a tragedy. The greater tragedy of course is the loss of life, soldier and civilian, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Confucius had it right in the old saying, when you go off to seek revenge, first dig two graves.

Having witnessed so much death and destruction up close I find it hard to greet the deliberate taking of a life with cheers and flag waving, even if that life belongs to Osama Bin Laden. As Americans don’t we claim that we treat life reverentially and take it reluctantly? I'd like to think we're better than those who would use terror to destroy our way of life. Cheering Osama’s death with rallies and flag waving seems somehow unseemly. It was necessary, I can't argue with that, but any killing is a tragedy.  Maybe our collective reaction speaks to the kind of country we’ve become over the last decade. Harder,  a little more callous, a little less compassionate. 

 I’d guess if you went out into the streets and talked to New Yorkers they would tell you that yes, Osama Bin Laden being killed is a good thing for the world, a necessary thing, but it can’t change the past, rebuild the World Trade Center or bring back the dead. His execution may provide us with some transient satisfaction, but it is unlikely to lead to a new era of Pax Americana. 

 A lot has changed in the last ten years. Impermanence is an undeniable and inescapable fact of human existence from which nothing that belongs to this earth is ever free. Osama Bin Laden may be dead, but we remain, flowing, drifting through the rest of our lives. What place is there in that river for anger and revenge?

Hyakujo's Fox

At the end of the work day I take a shuttle bus from my office building to the Secaucus Junction train station, where I catch a New Jersey Transit train into Manhattan, then transfer to the Long Island Railroad for the 55 minute ride to Syosset. There are a lot of steps to take and connections to be made, and when one element of the commute goes askew, it throws off everything else. A late connection or slow shuttle bus ride means that it can take me an additional hour to get home, which is problematic on the nights my wife has to work late or when we have somewhere to go. Fortunately it doesn’t happen all that often. More typical are the days when everything is just late enough that I have to sprint from one place to another in a state of low grade panic. That happens three out of five days in an average week. The weakest link in the chain is New Jersey Transit, whose trains are invariably late by five or more minutes, despite what the digital boards at the train station say about their arrival times. A little known fact about commuter rail is that trains are still considered “on-time” even if they arrive at a station 6 minutes past their scheduled time.

Missed connections. Made connections. Barely gained connections. Good opportunities to observe the immutable workings of cause and effect. A late shuttle bus translates into an ineffective sprint to catch a train, which causes a missed connection, which means I relieve the babysitter an hour later, which means she gets home late to her family, which means a fight with her husband, maybe a divorce, an angry ride down a winding country road, a deer on the hood, etc. etc. Aside from moving, or getting a new job there isn’t any way out. Of course, there isn’t any way around cause and effect, for anyone, which reminds me of Hyakujo’s Fox:

“Once when Hyakujo delivered some Zen lectures an old man attended them, unseen by the monks. At the end of each talk when the monks left so did he. But one day he remained after they had gone, and Hyakujo asked him: "Who are you?"

The old man replied: "I am not a human being, but I was a human being when the Kashapa Buddha preached in this world. I was a Zen master and lived on this mountain. At that time one of my students asked me whether or not the enlightened man is subject to the law of causation. I answered him: 'The enlightened man is not subject to the law of causation.' For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness I became a fox for five hundred rebirths, and I am still a fox. Will you save me from this condition with your Zen words and let me get out of a fox's body? Now may I ask you: Is the enlightened man subject to the law of causation?"
Hyakujo said: "The enlightened man is one with the law of causation."

At the words of Hyakujo the old man was enlightened. "I am emancipated," he said, paying homage with a deep bow. "I am no more a fox, but I have to leave my body in my dwelling place behind this mountain. Please perform my funeral as a monk." Then he disappeared.

The next day Hyakujo gave an order through the chief monk to prepare to attend the funeral of a monk. "No one was sick in the infirmary," wondered the monks. "What does our teacher mean?"

After dinner Hyakujo led the monks out and around the mountain. In a cave, with his staff he poked out the corpse of an old fox and then performed the ceremony of cremation.

That evening Hyakujo gave a talk to the monks and told them this story about the law of causation.

Obaku, upon hearing the story, asked Hyakujo: "I understand that a long time ago because a certain person gave a wrong Zen answer he became a fox for five hundred rebirths. Now I want to ask: If some modern master is asked many questions and he always gives the right answer, what will become of him?"

Hyakujo said: "You come here near me and I will tell you."

Obaku went near Hyakujo and slapped the teacher's face with his hand, for he knew this was the answer his teacher intended to give him.

Hyakujo clapped his hands and laughed at this discernment. "I thought a Persian had a red beard," he said, "and now I know a Persian who has a red beard."

Mumon's comment: "The enlightened man is not subject." How can this answer make the monk a fox?
"The enlightened man is one with the law of causation." How can this answer make the fox emancipated?

Conflict

Last night I got pissed off at my wife for not making dinner. Which, when you say it out loud (or write it down), seems downright ridiculous. The back-story: When I got home from work last night at 5:30, my son Jack was complaining about pain in his ear, so I bundled him into the mini-van and set out for the after-hours pediatric care center on the other side of town. A diagnosis of an ear infection, a prescription for antibiotics, and we were out the door. I stopped at the drug store to have the prescription filled, then headed home. We walked in the house at seven. My expectation was that my wife would be bustling around in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on a meal of some sort which I could then sit down and eat. I was pretty hungry, having last eaten at 3:00, and when I get hungry, I get crabby. I made some sort of offhand comment about there being no dinner, to which my wife responded in kind, so I called her a not-so-nice name, and then we fought for the rest of the night. Notably, neither one of us really ate anything after that, except for a desiccated pop tart (her) and a dry, stale slice of pizza (me).

Even as I was fuming around the kitchen in the immediate aftermath of our verbal exchange, I knew that fighting over something as trivial as who should have put the pizza in the toaster oven was a pretty stupid thing to do. Nevertheless, it is amazing how quickly the ego can make up the most illogical justifications for feeling wounded and how easily you can heap blame on other people when your expectations don’t meet up with reality.  (And this was happening less than four hours after I wrote the last posting on how absurd it is to think we can read other people’s minds. The assertive ego is nothing if not persistent).

What kept running through my head something along the lines of, well, shit, I know if our roles were reversed I would have made dinner. Which is a load of crap, obviously. The truth is, I have no idea what I would have done if our roles were reversed. I was conjuring up a fantasy future where I was the hero, which had absolutely no grounding in reality, and then using it as a yard-stick to measure someone else’s past behavior ,which itself existed nowhere other than in my unspoken expectations. That’s the ridiculous part.

What I could have done, what I should have done, was to walk over to the freezer, grab a frozen mushroom and truffle flatbread (from Trader Joe’s-yummy) and stick it in the toaster oven. Then everyone would have gotten something to eat and no one would have felt bad. Instead, I wrote a script about what was going to happen and when it didn’t happen the way I expected, I freaked out. Yes, blood sugar was low. Yes, it was late. Yes, my wife’s initial reaction was less than ideal, but none of that matters.

I guess the thing to keep in mind is that the ultimate responsibility for my actions lies with me. I am fully aware that I have control-freak tendencies which sometimes don’t mesh too well with my wife’s approach to organization. So, was I upset about dinner, or upset that she didn’t adhere to what I thought was the way the evening needed to unfold?  I think I need to work with this a little, but I'm pretty sure I know the answer.

Conflict does not necessarily have to be destructive. Sometimes it’s the fertilizer from which beautiful things grow, but sometimes it’s just cold pop-tarts and hurt feelings.

No Self

There is a rule of evidence in the law which considers speculative statements by witnesses about another’s state of mind to be inherently unreliable. Consequently, they are forbidden at trial. To me this seems like a sound legal principle. Asking a witness to speculate about what another person is thinking is fraught with the possibility of error. After all, one person cannot be inside of another person’s head, and mind-reading isn’t accepted by science. While the rule is properly enforced in a courtroom, it is more haphazardly applied in our personal lives.

Every day we draw conclusions about what other people are thinking, often without any basis. Often times we go even further, mentally categorizing them based on brief observations and filing them away on a shelf in our minds. There they become part of our mental construct; another delicate strand in our carefully built web of assumptions about the way the world works. Of course it’s all bullshit. There’s very little one can tell about a person’s mind by watching them for a few minutes on a train. Oh, we can pick up clues, like style or dress and reading material, but we don’t really know. Even when we think we know, we’re usually wrong. We think we're better at it when the person we think we've got figured out is someone close to us, but even there, we consistently fail to get it "right".

What I find interesting to consider, is that while we are experiencing other people’s existence in our daily routine and fitting them in our schemas, they are simultaneously experiencing our presence, drawing their own conclusions about us and filing us away on their own mental shelves.  I would imagine if we could see inside of their heads and read their thoughts, we would be appalled at the inaccurate assumptions. All of the begs the question, if we are all walking around with subjective beliefs about everyone we encounter, and they are doing the same about us, and we’re all wrong about everything, is there any objective “self” at all?  The bigger question is, “is there an objective reality at all?”

What I’ve gathered from Zen practice is that there may be an objective reality, but all the mental pictures, assumptions and habits that we consider to be such a solid part of who we are, isn’t part of it. What we consider the self is an aggregate of habits, perceptions and assumptions that is as transient as a snowflake in springtime. The trick is realizing that at the end of the day, there is no objective difference between you and me. We’re all the same, and we’re all in the same pickle boat floating not so serenely down the river of cause and effect.

You Got Problem, I Got Problem, Everybody Got Problem

That's the mantra that Ahmed, my Albanian landlord, used to intone whenever I came up with a fanciful excuse about why I couldn't pay the full $600 monthly rent on my Bronx apartment back in the 1980s.  He was a decent landlord and used to let me slide for a couple of weeks until I could come up with the scratch. I've been thinking a bit about excuses latey. What are they really? Are they reasons things don’t get done, or self-fulfilling prophesies grounded in nothing more substantial than our fleeting and ever-changing views on the way the world should be?  I mean, to some degree we ALL make excuses about why this or that thing never happened or couldn’t get done, and in some cases there is a legitimate basis for the excuse. Example: “I missed the meeting because the train was 30 minutes late”.  There’s nothing you can do about a missing train, so an excuse of that sort is really more of an explanation. No problem there.

The problem arises when we make excuses for why we can’t do something, despite the fact that the excuse is more properly characterized as an act of avoidance rather than an act of random happenstance. Does that make sense? People write all sorts of scripts in their heads and play their roles with great intensity. For example, “I have no time at all to meditate” is really a declaration of subconscious desire. “I don’t really want to meditate but I feel like I should so I’ll say I have no time” is probably more accurate.  The kicker is that most of the time we’re completely unaware that we are mentally shutting things down. This holds even when we’re directly challenged about something we really think we believe.

That said, assuming the role of “Director” and pointing out places where someone can easily, say, carve out 10 minutes of time out of their schedule to sit on a cushion, will not get anyone to change their minds (or behavior), but it will almost certainly get you into trouble. People don’t want their scripts (or beliefs) challenged; only validated. When we are challenged, we lock up. We can’t process the dissonance because it calls into question a very firmly held super-structure of beliefs about the way the world should be. Strongly held beliefs, as the Buddha told us all those years ago, are the principal cause of much of life’s needless suffering.

 I think that the role of Zen practice is to help us re-write our scripts.  What Zazen does is points us to where we’ve gotten stuck, and pries us loose from the web of beliefs and so-called certainties that we spin out of the silk of our mental constructs.

I have always believed that we manufacture a good measure of our own misery. One thing practice has taught me is that problems are never as insurmountable as we think they are. Often finding a solution to a problem that seems intractable is as simple as  sitting with it and unraveling the web of ideas, strand by strand.

Snowed Under

Here in the Northeast we’ve been coping with some pretty foul weather for the last couple of months. At least every other week we’ve been graced with a quantity of snow sufficient to gum up the wheels of commuting and commerce, while simultaneously delighting my school-age children who have gotten a few days off to wallow in cartoons and video games.

I’ve been trying to keep my cool and remain detached about the weather, but I’m starting to get a tinge of cabin fever, and the relentless wrath of mother nature is wearing me down. Snow has been on the ground since early December and it doesn’t look like it’s planning to go anywhere anytime soon. A two hour slog to work in the inky darkness isn’t helping my disposition, nor is the 15 minutes spent waiting on the train platform as icy wind and rain blast across my face while I’m waiting for the 6:26. Usually while I’m standing there, I’m thinking about what a sorry lot of pissed off people live on Long Island and why can’t these motherfuckers smile once in awhile. It usually dawns on me that I am, in fact, one of those sorry-ass, pissed off motherfuckers, and that realization, very occasionally, makes me smile.

Winter weather obviously means different things to different people. To my wife, who works in an elementary school, every weather forecast that predicts snow in any quantity represents the possibility of a day off from work. To my kids, who diligently wear white socks to bed and pray to the snow gods every night before turning off the lights, a big winter storm represents the possibility of being loosened from routine and given a day to do as they will. To me, another big storm represents three hours of shoveling the driveway and digging out the cars and the likelihood of mass transit headaches and a three hour commute.

The snow, of course, doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it; it just falls from the sky and piles up on the lawn. Maybe therein lies the key to successfully navigating the winter. I can’t make the snow stop falling or the wind stop blowing. I can’t make the house bigger. All I can do is clear the snow from my driveway and my mind and keep moving forward. Sometimes bitching about things you can’t control feels good and righteous, sometimes it makes you feel small and mean, but it doesn’t change a damn thing, so why waste the effort? Spring will be here soon enough. In the readiness of time, the flowers will bloom.

Paying Attention

Decisions have consequences. To a Zen student this fact should be glaringly obvious, but, being human beings as well as Zen students, we often choose to ignore predictable results when contemplating a course of action, especially if the results look like they’re going to be unpleasant. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, and all that. A particular set of consequences was thrust to the foreground this morning as I ran a quick analysis of my W2 on Turbo-Tax. I recall thinking about a year ago that I should really change my withholding now that I was a married man and couldn’t claim 4 dependents and head of household status. Of course I didn’t, and now the government is coming around, hat in hand, looking to balance the books with a payment that could, by my estimation, fund a few weeks of summer camp for both of my older children. I suppose I could blame the IRS, or the “marriage penalty” or any of a dozen other external reasons for why I’m looking at a large deficit instead of a large refund, but ultimately the blame is mine for failing to pay close enough attention.

As I get older I marvel at the number of things that can, quite easily, get hopelessly fucked up because I haven’t been paying attention. This list includes everything from the side-view mirror on the van to my relationship with my kids. Zen practice, whether on the cushion or out in the world is, at its essence, the practice of paying attention. Such an easy thing to say, such a hard thing to do.

Remembering Dr. King

I’ve been away for a few days, traveling for work. This time I was in Oregon working on a case involving concrete and organic food. There is a nexus, believe it or not. I had a free day on Saturday and I used it to visit the rightly famous Japanese Garden in Washington Park. The fact that it was raining only served to highlight the stark beauty of the garden in winter. Here’s a link to some video I shot that day. Apologies for the shaky camerawork. I was holding an umbrella and it was raining cats and dogs.

I do a lot of traveling for work. Last year I flew 42,000 miles and got to see a lot of interesting corners of the country. One of the cities I landed in last summer was Memphis Tennessee. It is hot there in August. So hot that I almost ended up with heat stroke when I took an ill-advised run along the Mississippi River in late afternoon. While business matters kept me pretty well occupied, on my way back to the airport I decided to take a drive over to the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. The façade of the Lorraine still looks as it did on the day King was shot, although the inside has been turned into the United States Civil Rights Museum, run by the National Parks Service. When I arrived it was still early in the morning and there were only a few tour buses around. A handful of other tourists were taking turns standing in front of the plaque that marked the spot below the balcony where King was shot. I don’t know whether this observation is really relevant but there were no white people visiting when I was there, only African American schoolchildren and parents with kids in tow. Maybe the racial diversity is more pronounced at other times, I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that the experience of standing under the balcony where King was shot was a powerful and moving experience. Rare is the individual who is willing to die for what he believes in. Rarer still is the individual who is willing to die for his belief that all men are deserving of respect and dignity and are equals in the eye of the creator. The night before he was shot, King made a speech that many regard as prophetic:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live - a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day. We should never forget King’s belief in the ability of nonviolence to effect social change and his commitment to compassion in action.

Status Update

Continuing with the theme of interconnectedness, I’ve been thinking about Facebook a lot lately. I have mixed feelings about the place. (Is it even a place?). On the one hand, it allows us to create our own webs of interconnectedness that theoretically join each one of us with everyone else. On the other hand, the way it affects our self-perceptions is a little screwy.

By way of an example, yesterday my wife and I found ourselves alternatively commenting on the same status update while sitting next to each other in the same room. We were essentially having a light-hearted, snarky conversation about fixing the car on the internet, rather than talking face to face. Since we obviously could communicate in person I had to wonder, for whose benefit were we doing this? When you’re commenting on someone’s status update there is a definite pressure to be entertaining; to go for the laugh. That’s what we were doing; providing entertainment for “friends” who seemingly have nothing better to do than to comment on the method I chose to fix my windshield wipers. Really, who gives a hoot? Who could possibly be interested in the minutia of my daily life to such a degree? I think the answer is that *I* am the one most interested in shouting my existence from the rooftops, and Facebook offers me a platform to do just that.

The ego loves Facebook, it really does. Under the guise of making connections with other people, it gets to puff and parade and shout, “look at me! I’m here! I’m interesting!” Our lives will always be much more interesting to ourselves than they ever will be to other people, but the self is pretty uncomfortable with that concept. If I’m putting something up on the internet and people are responding, well shit, I MUST be important!

One result of this engorgement of the sense of our own importance is that we’ve all turned into little revisionist archivists; incessantly documenting our own lives through photographs, video and pity sayings and presenting sanitized versions of our personal histories for all to see. What a strange way to spend one’s time. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras and smart phones allow for a sort of instant, technical scrapbooking, all geared towards leaving some kind of sunny, permanent record of our lives that bears no relationship to the often tumultuous suffering that we all experience as a normal part of being human. The more I think about it, the stranger it seems.

Does Facebook represent the idealized vision of our life as we would like it to be? No one ever posts unflattering pictures of themselves, do they? No one ever posts status updates about how miserable they are. In fact, if they did, they would probably be ignored. So what is the point of this seemingly pointless exercise? Facebook might connect us in some superficial, transient way, but it seems to me that the web it spins traps only ephemeral egos.

As usual, I’m probably over thinking it. Maybe it’s human nature to want to connect with others, no matter how superficially. Technology has given us a wonderful way to link the best intellects of all humanity through the internet so we can work together to solve the intractable problems of our age, and we use it to share videos of the dog chasing his tail.  I guess that’s ok, as long as we recognize that the dog, when you look at it closely, is us.

The Interwebs

The shooting in Arizona has left me a little out of sorts. Random acts of senseless violence appear with some frequency in our society, but we still draw in our collective breath each time another fruit loop releases his grip on the last strand of his sanity and starts blasting away.  The violence in Tucson was tragic, to be sure. One glimmer of hope to be derived from this event appears in the overwhelming response of the ordinary people. Despite our differences, political and social, we all condemn the loss of life and grieve together.  Maybe that’s not a lot, but to me it means that we’re still cognizant of our connection to one another, in some minor way.

One of the earliest Buddhist allegories I recall learning about in some Zendo or other was that of Indra’s Net. A core teaching of Buddhism is that all phenomena are intimately connected. The mythical structure of Indra's net, symbolizes the universe and represents the idea that infinitely repeated mutual relations exist between all members of the universe. Indra's net has a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels, representing the unity and mutual dependence of all phenomena. Alan Watts described it as:

"… a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." --Alan Watts^[1]

Reminders of our inconnectedness seem in short supply these days. The mass media is more likely to focus on conflict, since conflict sells ad space and advertisements sell products. As a bit of an aside, the association between conflict and consumerism is something to ponder, although it is a bit beyond the scope of today’s post. It is unfortunate that tragedy seems to be the place where we most recognize our collective humanity, but it’s also the thing that seems to most draw our collective attention. Like moths to the flame, we fly into the light together, only to recognize too late that we’re burning.

Days 3, 4, 5

When you have children, there are usually innumerable opportunities during the average day to practice kindness. Usually the opportunity will arise when you catch them drawing on the bed room wall or playing catch with a light-bulb or something like that. Your first instinct might be to start yelling and dispensing punishments. Really though, what’s the point? The only one who gets bent out of shape is you, and the kids just learn that they have to hide their malfeasance a little better the next time.

Lately, during a spate of what seemed to me to be naughtier than normal behavior, I’ve started to wonder whether the problem is with the boys or whether the blame can be more appropriately laid at the feet of my own ego. I’ve really wrestled with this. On the one hand, you cannot permit your kids to go all Picasso on the furniture, or practice professional wrestling moves in the living room. On the other hand, getting mad at and laying into the kids for acting like kids is kind of insane. Plus, if they know that something drives you crazy, they will often repeat it over and over, just to watch you go crazy. In that respect, raising children is not very different from formal Zen practice.

I haven’t been doing too well with the kids lately. The holidays drained me of energy, money and patience and I’ve been a bit of an asshole. The weather hadn’t helped either. Of course there’s nothing I can do about any of those external things so I should follow my own advice and lighten up. Easy for me to say!

Here’s a run-down of the project’s last few days. Gandhi I’m not, but it’s the little things:

Wed: Shared 2 tins of peanuts I received from clients with co-workers

Thurs: Gave directions to someone who looked lost without asking

Fri: Gave last towel in the gym to co-worker and used a dirty one in my locker

The Second Day: Counseling the Grieving

Although I generally eschew the facile aphorisms of New Age gurus, I suppose there is something of value in one or two of them. One that comes to mind is, “don’t sweat the small stuff, and its all small stuff.” A fairly Buddhist sentiment, really. When compared with the great matter of life and death, what’s a little bird shit on your new suit? Of course, there are times when you need to sweat the small stuff, like when you’re preparing to, say,  go scuba diving in a  cave, or when you’re picked by your boss to deliver your division’s numbers to the entire company at the annual meeting. Most of the time though, we don’t need to be so obsessed with getting it all perfect, and we really don’t need to get so worked up when it doesn’t turn out that way. I think most of us know this intrinsically, but we still can’t help freaking out over really trivial shit. I’ve tried to work on this area of my life a little and have developed some awareness of the transient nature of most irritations. Through experience I’ve learned that however significant you may think the thing is that’s causing you trouble, if you sit with it and keep it company for a while it will turn into something more manageable. You usually even find yourself shaking your head at how nuts you were over it. Of course, even knowing this, it’s a struggle not to become overwhelmed at times.

I came to more fully accept the truth of the impermanence of all things in January of 2007 when my wife of 11 years died during child birth at the age of 39.  Let me tell you, nothing drives home the truth of Buddhist teachings more than the loss of a spouse at a young age. In one instant, my life completely changed. There was precious little time to reflect on trivialities. I suddenly had an infant son with all sorts of immediate needs, and a very steep learning curve. I didn’t have time to sweat the small stuff. Things that drove me up a wall way back in my old life seemed completely unimportant afterward. In large measure they still do. Life dishes up its share of tragedy, but it is also a grand comedy. Taking trivial things too seriously is wasted effort.

One of my co-workers unexpectedly lost her husband over the holidays. He suffered from sleep apnea and one night he went to bed and apparently had a heart attack. He was only 58 and otherwise in good health. I went over to her desk and shared a little of my personal experience with her and then talked with her about what she’s likely to be in for over the next few months and offered my counsel. People who have been through this sort of personal tragedy tend to intrinsically know that getting upset over minutiae is pointless. I think she felt free to open up a bit more about what she was going through with someone who had been through a similar experience. I really don’t like talking about that time in my life, especially with someone I don’t know that well, but overcoming my discomfort to help her deal with her grief seemed the right thing to do. Hopefully I was able to help her feel better, or at least help her put things in perspective.

Tomorrow I'm going back to holding open doors and giving seats to old ladies. Its much easier.

The First Day

I’m not a religious person. I’m not even a particularly spiritual person. In fact, I pride myself on my rationality. I tend to shy away from (if not outright mock) the airy-fairy New Age bullshit that’s being peddled by the Deepak Chopra types on the Oprah network. If I had to pick a modern Buddhist teacher whose beliefs are most in line with my own, I’d pick Brad Warner, author of Hardcore Zen. Brad is a Soto Zen priest who is also the bass player for a hardcore punk rock band. I’m also a native New Yorker and have developed a fairly thick skin after years of riding the subways and haunting the streets at night. Paying attention to the troubles of other people doesn’t come naturally to me. Hell, I suspect it doesn’t come naturally to anyone, except maybe the Dalai Lama.

Part of what I’m trying to do with this project is to become more aware of the needs of others. There is no better place to do this than in the mass transit system. Everybody needs something down in that rat hole. More space, a seat, food, a good psychiatrist; things like that. Yesterday I was making my usual last minute dash for the 4:31 and I found myself walking neck in neck with a spry septuagenarian past the almost full LIRR cars. We spied the empty seat at the same time and both quickened our pace. It looked like it was going to be flying elbows at the door, since neither one of us wanted to stand for the duration of the 55 minute trip, or worse, be consigned to the dreaded “middle-seat.” As we approached the aisle, I remembered my plan and I let her scurry by me into the seat.She flashed me a look of triumph and I smiled and found another seat.

I realize it wasn’t much, but it was my first day and Penn Station is a very difficult place to practice compassion. 364 to go.

Beginning

This is a blog about compassion. More precisely, it’s a blog about my personal attempt to understand the nature of compassion and how to apply that understanding to my life.

 I’m a 43 year-old married father of three boys who works as a lawyer for an insurance company. I live on Long Island and commute by train to an anonymous office park in New Jersey where I spend the day evaluating lawsuits brought against power companies. A couple of times a month, I get on an airplane and fly to some random corner of the United States where I participate in mediations that usually result in a monetary settlement of the aforementioned lawsuits. In my spare time, such as it is, I run and practice Zen Buddhism.

During the course of my work I am regularly confronted with people who have sustained the most horrible, disfiguring injuries that you could possibly imagine. Many of these are burn injuries. These are people who are suffering terribly, whether through my client’s negligence, their own negligence, or just through the random happenstance of karma. When you deal with human suffering like this on a daily basis you naturally want to build up your defense mechanisms. The problem with building up defense mechanisms like gallows humor and cynicism is that these mental constructs get in the way of experiencing your life as it really is. Detaching from the pain and suffering of others intrinsically means that you become detached from your own. One of the basic truths of Buddhism is that we are all connected on a fundamental level. There is no difference between “you” and “me”.

I recognized that in order to more fully recognize and actualize this universal connection in my own life, I needed to step forward and embrace it. In order to do this I decided that I would resolve to practice one selfless act per day for a year to see whether at the end of the year I was any closer to understanding the nature of compassion and the interconnectedness of all beings than I was at the start of the year.

This blog is a record of my efforts. I kind of missed the first few days of the calendar year so I decided to start this project on my birthday, January 3, 2011. Stay tuned.