It’s funny; I think my mission has been to “stop
caring so much” (or, similarly, “stop trying so hard”) for… decades, at
least. As you are profoundly aware, I
can’t even begin to fathom how deeply interpersonal interactions affect me;
even just turning down all of the traditionally-dressed Cusqueños today who
were selling knit hats and tassels and little pens with llamas made out of
string on top feels pretty crummy, and the crumminess endures until the next interpersonal
interaction which more whole. And for quite some time, due to not knowing how to get myself to a place where the crummy stops, I've been trying to force myself to just not care in the face of situations where I feel awkward or badly, even those I cannot easily change. It's as if I have often been the younger monk in the story, who just couldn't get the heck over it. While I hadn’t heard the story before (some
quick internet searches led me to this. Also this,
heh.), after reading it, I quite like your idea that it’s
about caring vs. not caring, especially about dogma.
I actually don’t know that not hoping for
something is the same as not caring – but I do think it’s sort of moving on
from your attachment to specifically what you find yourself wanting to
happen. I think regularly about how
often I would ask if a situation was what you expected, and you’d respond that
you hadn't had any expectations. That
always amazed me, but also often gave me the impression that you were then able
to be much more attentive to the next step.
We’d come to a river, or a puddle, or a field, or a mountain, or
whatever it was, and while I’d still be trying to figure out how the reality
matched my expectations on the other side, you’d seem to have a hold on that
tiny facet of Buddhist-described enlightenment. I liked that; whether or not you had hoped
or not, had cared or not, had moved on or not, that often made a useful story
for my brain to use as a lesson for spending less time making expectations and
more time experiencing what was going on.
Not really a “give up hope” or even “stop caring” entirely, just sort of
a “stop effing thinking about it so much and experience it already”. My friend Michael (a gentle CFARian type)
teaches workshops on Againstness, which talks about just that sort of stop shoving, pause, start taking
satisfaction approach.
Awww, that sounds like a delightful system! I can absolutely see you taking an
endearingly curmudgeonly satisfaction in keeping your points in the
hundreds. ;) I’m glad to hear that so
many things are clean and fit and reasonable!
When I read your post at first, the next few hours were filled with, “Oh,
do I really want to be buying facebook browsing with my time right now?” Mine didn’t last for long, but it was sort of
a nice surge.
Interestingly, Molly Moscoe (former roommate and
coworker of the last few months, and all-around wonderful woman extraordinaire)
had commented over dinner a few months ago that, when she was single, she felt
like all she had was time. I took it to
mean that, because she didn’t have a partner or a family coming into sight, she
had an eternity stretched out in front of her, but in fact, she meant almost the
contrary: the only thing we have is
time. She said it as she was moving her things back
to her apartment in San Jose, so the full import of what she was saying really
didn’t hit me for awhile. It did last
night. If all we have is time, then I
want to be spending most of my time doing things that make me happy and help me
improve myself, with people that make me happy and help me improve myself, whom
I help to make happy and improve themselves, as well. It’s going to take some consideration (and
goal factoring and aversion factoring and more thinking and writing), but I
realized last night that I actually do have
everything I need to start now. As you are once again probably acutely aware,
I feel like I have spent years
waiting until this school year is over, or until that relationship is good
again, or until I have moved somewhere more stable… and
then beating myself up when I get to the summer and need to recover.
I feel like I am finally, finally in a place to start making actual changes. I’m sure you’ve heard that one before,
because I remember feeling this way, but this time around, I’m not having to
wait for something. School is crazy. Relationships are willy-nilly up in the air. I have no idea where I’ll be living in 6 months’
time. And yet, I now have the systems I
need to really start looking at things, and have gotten to the point where I
realized that I’ve been working this
whole time. Working to get to a
place where I realize that sleep is important, and connected to my appetite,
health, and general ability to be pleasant to people. Where I realize that maybe a job that
stresses me out to the point that I have health and relationship problems
because of it not just isn’t the right answer for me, but might not even be the
right way to be making the contributions I want to make. Where I realize that sometimes, it’s OK to
embrace the cycles of productivity and re-charging, of doing and doing and
doing and then processing, of reading bunches at a time and then going out and
trying to practice what I’ve read.
Anyway, blah blah blah, that’s enough telling you the general gist of that
I want to make a change; now it’s time to make
it. (Ahhh, the romance of possibility,
of potential, of
being in a place where I’m just starting out!)
*
* *
While I know that you do not need my sanction, I
hear you when it comes to trying to rebuild friendships with people who have
sort of slumped back into the general trough of acquaintance-ship; it’s always
a bit deflating to hear that I have been replaced, just as I sometimes will have
replaced such a friend, and I never know quite what to do, either. I envy not your position of slipping into being
seen as Socrates, but I actually very seldom know what I am to others or give
to them, which rather complicates the matter, as well.
In the time since I last posted, I realized that
I was trying to force things. By asking
a very thinly veiled version of the question, “How do I make someone be better,
and improve in the ways which would please me?” I realized that (a) ugh, what a
horribly self-centered thing to want to be able to do, but also (b) oh!, my
relationship with that someone is probably in need of a bit of tweaking if it feels
like I want that one to change in order to continue as we are. Indeed, I also have way more than I can do to
keep myself growing, so, at this point, I have rescinded my desire to make
anyone else do so.
But wow. The frame of realizing that people – and I
count as one! – are growing all the time really reinforces one of the possible reverberations
of Miss Molly Moscoe’s reminder that we only have time; if I am always going to
be growing, and I can’t even keep track of the influences on that growth, I
should really try to do all I can to make it so that the influences I can keep track of are positive ones. And, I think you’re right – once that’s done,
once I have my music and happy light on or my friends close, the next best step
is to get out of the way. Whether or not
my growth or anyone’s growth leads to happiness is anyone’s guess – but perhaps,
with fewer damn expectations for what I want the outcome to be, I might even
lift my head up a bit, take a breath, and realize I’m already quite satisfied.
Love and love, taitai,
~k
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