Year: 2010

I’ve been working towards my dream for years now. What dream? To teach Quiet Mind Seminars and to write. But haven’t I been doing that? Yes, but unfortunately it doesn’t pay the bills, and I have to keep up my computer and website business. The price of chasing my dream is long hours immersed in this highly focused, mentally taxing work.

My clients call me the computer expert. I find that description a bit of a stretch, but it’s true that I do tricks and escape from traps that drive normal people crazy. They don’t want to lose their minds, so they hire me to lose it for them. You laugh? Hey … a little compassion please.

Several times a week something goes awry; several times a year a whole week goes awry. This is shaping up to be one such week. I’ve been wrestling with printed circuits and hexadecimal code for hour after long hour, falling behind on both my day job and my labors of love. This blog is now two days late; my revamped website is six months overdue. My next book is…okay, now I’m starting to choke up.

In my mindful reflection workshops I talk about how expectations set us up for disappointment. I preach detachment. I encourage my students to let go. I take the moments of silence to sit quietly and practice what I preach. Next morning, though, I’m back bending computers to my will—or having my will bent to theirs. It’s poetic justice, I suppose. A reminder of real life. How easy it is to maintain peace of mind when the circumstances are just right, but how about when they’re not? 

The thing is, to dream a good dream and stay on track. Wish wisely, and never give up.

I dreamed a familiar old dream last night. Returning to school after the holidays I ran into my maths teacher.

“Sorry I’m late for your class, Sister,” I said.

She gazed out of her wimple scornfully and asked, “My class? You think you’re in my class?” She waved me into the classroom where the blackboard announced the division of the class into two groups: whizzes and ignoramuses. On my desk lay last term’s exam paper, a large “28%” circled in red. Sister ushered the whizzes out towards their new classroom as it sank in that I was not among the chosen.

What made this dream especially poignant was that maths was one of the two subjects I actually never failed, despite my generally poor performance (the other was English). Just two and a half years from my sixtieth birthday, I’m still haunted—not just by my old failures but also, infernally, by the compulsion to disallow my successes.

I told Caroline, and she nodded understandingly. Dreams like this seem to hound everyone. “But you don’t feel like a failure now, do you?” she asked rhetorically, and listed my accomplishments in the brightest possible light.

“At this moment,” I said, still weighed down by the dream’s traumatic remnants, “I still do.”

“But you know you’re not,” she said.

“Oh yes, I know that…or rather I decide that. I’m not sure which,” I said. “…. I can rationalize that feeling away. Lord knows, I’ve done it before hundreds of times; but the feeling’s always there—latent.”

“Well,” she replied, “it keeps you humble, doesn’t it?”

“Perhaps—in theory,” I said.

This is the third time I’ve used the phrase “In theory.” in this very blog in recent days. In theory, I’m not a hopeless failure, but in my neural pathways, evidently, that conviction remains intact, even though there’s also a whole set of rational counter-proposals.

The art of positive thinking would have us believe that we can focus on just the good stuff, and become our very best. Sounds great—in theory—but I keep falling back on what the Buddha had to say about suffering: that we impose it on ourselves by stubbornly clinging to our cherished sense of self, as if we arise independently of the causes and conditions of our lives, irrespective of our circumstances. It seems to me that positive thinking demands that we deny all that’s unwelcome about who we are. Surely the Buddha’s approach is infinitely more real—a quality that, in the ripeness of middle-age, I value much more than transitory beauty, harmony and security.

Following on yesterday’s blog, I know that after thirty-five years and counting, mindful reflection has made quite a difference. I don’t give in to automaticity as I once did. I don’t invest myself quite as unquestioningly in comfort and security. That weak little insight about samsara really can fight back against the unstoppable force of habit, like David against Goliath.

Trouble is, a single slingshot pebble won’t do it. Each moment arrives with a new giant to conquer, and staying cool and aiming straight depends on taking one moment at a time. When I remember to do that, I’m saner. When it slips out of mind, I find myself acting like an idiot. Well actually, I don’t find myself at all, that’s the problem. I dig myself into a bit of a hole before I realise I’m up to my neck. Then I wake up; and of course I stop—for a while.

Ideas are so great, aren’t they—like the idea of mindfulness? So linear and tidy and elegant. Nothing like reality.

My book The Novice got a great review yesterday. I was happy not just because the reviewer liked it, but because he liked it in just the way I wanted readers to. He got the point, from beginning to end, and appreciated the work I put into it. So for a while I went around grinning like the Cheshire cat, particularly so because the week before, expecting a promised big review, I was let down. It turned out not to be a review at all but a listing—one book among many; yawn! Continue reading “Samsara”

I don’t know how I keep up with all I do, but I do know it’s only a fraction of what I have to do. Writing books, promoting them through social networking sites, interviews and lectures, maintaining this blog and my websites, preparing mindful reflection workshops, teaching them, writing homework and answering email—this all adds up to a forty-hour week, easy. As you might imagine, my day-job really gets in the way (by the way, it’s building computers and websites). Unfortunately—or fortunately as sensible people like to remind me—it pays the bills. Continue reading “Rush, rush, rush”