So the third night that she was in town, Debbie joined us at Sangha and the whole normal dharma study was suspended. (We still did our normal meditation, though.) Debbie was there partly as just one more meditator but also unavoidably as the Founder-and-visiting-VIP; and the woman who normally leads us had gotten her to agree just to talk to us about what she had been doing spiritually and professionally since she left town in mid-2013. And then people had questions, but it meant that she talked a lot about her meditation practice, its ups and downs, and what she was getting out of it. And it was really interesting. She’s been practicing a lot longer and a lot more diligently than I have, so there’s a lot that she can talk about — some of it was about how in the long run meditation really did make her mind more stable and less subject to hair-trigger emotions, and some of it was about how she thought it was going to solve all her problems and make life smooth and easy only to find out that ... no, it really didn’t do that. In fact when there were ugly things lurking inside her somewhere, meditation stripped away all the stories and excuses they usually hid behind to leave them ever more visible. (Oops.)
I wrote some of this to Marie afterwards, who replied,
I suspect if I'd been to your sangha, I would
have been fighting feelings of inferiority as I listened... which would, mind
you, be its own spiritual exercise. But it would also have been
interesting....
Wait, meditating won't solve all my life
problems? Or eliminate everything about myself I dislike???
WAAH! Okay, I'm never doing it again! Heck, I'll stop eating
healthily too, because veggies don't solve all my health problems. All or
nothing!
My reply to her was a little long:
“Fighting
feelings of inferiority”? If I was reading tone of voice correctly during
Sangha, I think you wouldn’t have been the only one. It seemed to me that a
couple of the other members were reacting much the same way, and that the
feeling was mellowed only by their knowing Debbie for years as an old friend. But
still ... when your old friend wins the Nobel Peace Prize and you’re still
puttering around in the garden and shooing kids off your lawn, it’s hard not to
notice the difference.
That’s
a deliberate exaggeration, of course. But envy can be a funny thing.
At
the same time, though, Debbie strongly resists being put up on a pedestal. I
remember early on when we were together saying something fond and doting about
how exemplary she was, and she almost snapped at me. In any event she shut me
down very brusquely. She made it clear that she did not want to hear such talk,
and that she felt it was unhealthy in a relationship. You may remember in your first email to me back around New Year’s Day 2016, you told me to stop
idealizing you, and I replied that yes, I knew I had a bit of a problem with
that but was trying to work on it. This is why.
And
if you listen to Debbie long enough, she can unravel a story that makes everything
she has done and learned look like a simple, natural reaction to problems she
was having, as if anyone in the same pickle would have done the same thing. She
volunteered to lead meditation groups in urban prisons because students in her
M. Div. program were required to put in a certain
number of hours in pastoral service of some kind. She was in that program in
the first place because she had learned over the years she wasn’t very skillful
at the core nursing tasks of giving shots or changing bedpans, but she had a
knack for talking to grieving families. She was in nursing at all because she
felt like her earlier career (which was where I met
her) wasn’t personally fulfilling at a values level, and at that point her
husband was making so much money she didn’t have to work to pay the bills.
Hell, she got into that earlier career through a friend of her mother’s, and it beat her
previous job which was as a salesgirl at the jewelry counter at some department store. She
started meditating because her mind and emotions used to jump around too much;
she started following Thich Nhat Hanh because he so directly addressed the
kinds of suffering she was trying to get out of (related not only to whatever
was going on at the time but to her childhood growing up around alcohol and
abuse); she founded our sangha here — and then more recently the sangha at her
current UU church where she lives now — for selfish reasons, because she needed other
people to practice with. And so on. On and on. It all makes sense, it all hangs
together as a story, and when she tells it no single step seems particularly
remarkable. And yet here we are.
Maybe
there are a couple of ways to confront these kinds of feelings. One is the
meditative approach, which is first to notice them; and then to remind
yourself that fame and blame are both pretty random and fundamentally
meaningless, and that you already have more than enough conditions to be happy.
Another approach is to critique the feelings intellectually. Recognize that
everyone spends their time on something, and that after you spend 10,000
hours on something you start to get good at it. Debbie has spent her time on this
spiritual work. The rest of us spend it wherever we spend it. To make that
observation a little less abstract, consider that I started writing poetry
again when I was writing poems to send to D. She would send me in turn
poems that she had read somewhere and particularly liked. When I got together
with Debbie, I was thrilled — thrilled! — that over the course of several
months she sent me three haikus that she had actually composed herself. Now
remind me, sweetness — how many poems have you written and sent me?
Well,
then.
Of
course none of this is a competition, not really. But ... well, then.
Also I recognize that it is always a lot harder to see
achievements in oneself than in others. And while I am deeply fond of Debbie and
credit her with a lot, I find it easy to believe that she doesn’t see herself
as clearly as we see her from the outside because she knows the less attractive
parts all too well. Same as any of us. When I said (a couple of paragraphs
above) that she could tell a story that made all these things she has done seem
natural and obvious, I assume that the words “tell a story” chimed inside your
head, and that you thereby understood that her discomfort with excessive praise
might have an element of story-itis about it. Not saying that for sure, but
it’s possible. And truly it is harder to see achievements in
yourself. To me your literary achievements are obvious; but I have to strain
hard to realize that not everyone can do the things I do at work, or raise children, or calm hysterical women (a skill which clearly I
no longer need, and boy am I grateful!). But I wouldn’t be surprised if you
have a story to tell that pretends your literary ability is nothing much. Just
for the record that story is wrong, but you might believe it anyway.
It’s hard to see achievements in oneself.
The next morning, Debbie left town after breakfast to head back to her mother's house, from which -- a few days later -- she returned home. But it was a very pleasant visit, and the two of us seem to be settling into a confortable kind of post-romance friendship. I'm glad.