Speak No Evil
When I was a business manager I made a point to tell my staff that I would not tolerate gossip or negative conversations about other members of the community. We would not gather around the water cooler and say the Faculty were idiots because they didn’t know that the mouse needed to be in contact with the table in order to move the pointer. We would not make fun of a student who lost her thesis at the 11th hour because she opened an EXE file in her email that destroyed her hard disk.
I gave lectures to the freshman class every August that said … “Never write anything in email (or on the internet) that you don’t want published on the front page of the LA Times. Or better yet that you don’t want your Grandmother to read!” One of the two hooks was usually sufficient to make an impression on the young minds.
And of course the converstion is not limited to what we put in print. I recall being in the ladies room after a final exam, talking with my best friend. She was in the stall next to me and I was kevetching about the professor and how inexperienced she was yadda yadda yadda. When I came out to wash my hands, I saw the faculty member standing there. Ask me what I got on that test.
Its a lesson that I wish I could say I learned one time and never repeated. When I wear my Zen hat or sit on my meditation cushion, its easy to be at PEACE and have compassion, not only for others but for our very broken sense of Self. However, the pull towards drama and mountain making mole hills is so great that at times even the sage falls to her knees and curses the dirt for being untidy.
Oh my yes, there most certainly is a story here behind my loosely guarded prose. But the work and the lesson for me is where to go from here. I took a stroll in my wheel chair with my youngest daughter today. Enmeshed in the middle of high-school she is all too familiar with drama and hormonal outbreaks. “Did you hear what the ho Becka did after the football game?” And my apologies to any Becka that goes to school with my daughter … I am speaking of course hypothetically.
In the moment, I explained to her, it’s important that we BE who we say we are. If we are to embody the practice of compassion and loving kindness, then our words must always match our intentions. Even when we think no one else is listening. Even when we think we are simply “venting”.
“But how DO we vent then?” she asked. “Its not good to keep that inside.”
To keep WHAT inside? A bio-chemical moment of misunderstanding or mistrust? A value judgement on another sentient human being who was as always doing her best in the moment? When we SEE clearly that each of us are licking our own self-inflicted wounds then there is simply no need to TAKE ON the poison that we may feel coursing thru our veins.
There is NOTHING to vent when we see the world through the eyes of compassion. The “I” of compassion.
It was a good walk and a wonderful conversation with my darling little one. Moreover, it was an important wake up call for ME … to remember WHO I AM and who I decided to be a very long time ago. And as I sit and reprogram my moral GPS I bow deeply and recommit myself to The Practice.
