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.