A visit from Debbie, part 2

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.