Wise and good

NOTE: I am writing this post some nine years after the fact, on May 21, 2022. But I have back-dated it to where it belongs in the narrative. My hope is that it will give you a little more information about Debbie.

I've mentioned that Debbie is a Buddhist, and that we have gone on a meditation retreat together. I think I have neglected to mention that she specifically follows the Plum Village tradition of Thích Nhất Hạnh, and that she has formally received the Five Mindfulness Trainings. This put her on the path towards ordination as a lay member of the Order of Interbeing, a goal she is hoping to reach soon.

Part of the process is that she has to provide letters of recommendation from people who know her, to describe how her practice of the Five Mindfulness Trainings has informed her life. I'm not sure how many letters she is supposed to provide, but I'm pretty sure it's more than one. Anyway, she asked me to write one of them. I wrote four paragraphs, explaining that we are dating and giving some other background. But then came the core of my letter, as follows:

Early in our relationship, I asked myself quite explicitly what I saw in her, what it was about her that attracted me.  This was (and is) a practical question: I have had other romantic relationships (including a marriage, now ended) that have not gone so well; and I have no intention of repeating past mistakes.  Once burned, twice shy.  The answer that came to me, and it has become only clearer with time, is that Debbie is wise and good.  These are heavy words, but they are exactly what I mean and I use them very specifically.  When I say that Debbie is wise, I don’t mean that she knows everything, nor that her opinions are necessarily always right; what I mean is that she knows how to frame questions in the right way.  Whatever we discuss, no matter how difficult, she sees what parts of it are important, and therefore what the foundation of any decision has to be.  Likewise when I say that she is good, I don’t mean that she is somehow miraculously free of those moments of distraction or irritation that beset all the rest of us; what I mean is that, once she collects herself, she knows those moments for what they are, and she knows that she knows better.  In other words, she can understand that she has been distracted or irritated or whatever, and so can disengage whatever rankled feelings she might still have from the rest of what is going on; this then frees her to understand the people involved from a perspective of basic kindness.  This is easy to say; but I have to admit that it can be surprisingly hard to do, and Debbie succeeds in doing it.  Perhaps this fundamental wisdom and goodness address the very first criterion [that you list for candidates], that an aspirant have learned to transform suffering and that she embody mindfulness in her own life.

When I first settled on the words wise and good, they frightened me, because they sound so heavy, so meaningful, so portentous. But the more I thought about them, the more I realized that they were exactly what I wanted to say. In the sense that I explain them above, they are exactly true. 

Of course you are free to tell me that I'm in love, so of course I'm going to use high-flown adjectives to describe her. And you're not wrong. But I think there's more to it than that.