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.