Bad Buddhist

Sitting zazen with others during a Zen meditation retreat, it is not so difficult to accept the idea of non-attachment and be wholly content with just the body, mind and breath, alongside the three meals per day served. But the real test is out into the maelstrom of the world with its insistence that you need this and you need that and if one of those gets lost, stolen or breaks, you’re up—at least temporarily—the proverbial creek without a paddle. And that test I failed miserably yesterday.

 

It started with working on a document for 40 minutes and then it seeming to have disappeared. Deep primeval grunts of frustration came up from my belly, much to the chagrin of my wife who happened to be in the room. Then another frustrating moment when our plan to visit our grandson Malik in his class and me teach a few songs was thwarted by a new school policy that required 24-hour notice, as explained by the principal who we knew and liked and seen how we gave wonderful classes to the kids at the school for the past seven years. Aargh!

 

But the worst was at the airport when my bag didn’t come out of the security tunnel machine and when I asked the woman, she shrugged as if she hadn’t seen it. I had to rush a long loop back to security check-in thinking I left it there and then while running around, realized I hadn’t picked up my backpack. The bag wasn’t at the check-in, so I checked in again to at least get my backpack and no one knew where it was. So for that brief moment, I was faced with the loss of my computer, my journal, the new books I had bought, a suitcase full of clothes and toiletries. 

 

The Zen master in the old stories would just smile and say, “Is that so?” and accept it all with equanimity. Not this bad Buddhist, wrapped in deep confusion, outrage at the system, threatening-to-erupt tears and generally on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was at that moment when I saw my bag and backpack on the other side of the belt, where the woman who said she didn’t know where they were had put them for a completely unnecessary bag check. AARRRRGGGGHHHHH!! Of course, I was relieved, but the damage to my tender psyche had already been done.

 

Everything in those bags was replaceable, though of course the loss of the computer would have been a huge nightmare. I still had my phone and my hearing aids with me, but still there was a snowflake’s chance in hell that I could have just taken a calming breath and accepted the situation. And this revealed not only my failure as a Buddhist, but my unchangeable identity as a contemporary American who expects everything to go my way, to work, to be fair.

 

Think about it. We are brought up in and live in a world where there is a pill for every ailment, a therapist for every symptom of mental disquiet, a plumber to fix our leaks and a doctor to fix our other ones. We expect food on all supermarket shelves and feel outraged if they’re out of our particular brand of mustard. We feel we deserve the best car in the best neighborhood with our children going to the best schools. We hire mediators to solve our disagreements and lawyers our bigger ones. We expect the answer to every question with a quick click on Google, curse if our computer is three seconds too slow or the bus 3 minutes late. We expect to get into the best senior care home and never stop to think we might be grateful for not being sent out on an ice floe to our death the moment we stop being useful to society. We expect all our children to grow up happy and healthy. We expect to be sheltered from the rain and snow and wind, cooled when it’s hot, heated when it’s cold and if the weather goes too far, FEMA better be there to help. We expect and expect and expect and if the world doesn’t meet our expectations, we are disappointed, let down, outraged, angry and astonished as if a promise were broken. And I mean “we” literally here. I’m in that club.

 

But that hasn’t been the case and still isn’t the case in so many cultures around the world. People used to have 9 or 10 children as a survival mechanism knowing that half of them might not make it past birth or five years old. Much of the world hasn’t and still doesn’t expect leaders to care about them, corruption and bribery is simply another tool of survival and many can't speak freely about their feelings and thoughts in public without risking Siberia, a Turkish prison or a public execution. 

 

None of these contemporary expectations are bad in and of themselves and indeed, some of those expectations are what keeps life in some sort of balance and opens the door to increased justice, compassion and quality of life. At the same time, it’s useful to take a step back and notice when we’ve gone too far, taken things for granted that are rare blessings, forgotten how to be grateful for what we do have and what does work rather than incensed over all that doesn’t. Especially in this moment when the expectation of democracy working as it has and possibly one day better than it has been has been thrown back in our face. Here’s how one of the characters in Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible puts it:

 

Maybe I’ll never get over my grappling for balance never stop believing life is going to be fair, the minute we can clear up all these mistakes of the temporarily misguided. It’s in my blood. I anticipate rewards for goodness and wait for the ax of punishment to fall upon evil, in spite of years I’ve rocked in this cradle of rewarded evils and murdered goodness. Just when I start to feel jaded to life as it is, I’ll suddenly wake up in a fever, look out at the world, and gasp at how much has gone wrong that I need to fix. I loved my father (here I substitute”country”) too much to escape being molded to at least some part of his vision.

 

I’ve come a long way from my almost-lost suitcase here! Still I’m grateful that I still have the computer to write this on and my clothes are back on their hangers. At the same time that I hope to increase my gratitude for life as it is and always has been and always will be, with its mixture of calm sunny days and tornados, beautiful births and hard-to-accept deaths, unexpected human kindnesses and outrageous human cruelties, I will take full advantage of what can be fixed this week— going to the dentist, my haircutter, taking the car in for a check-up. I’ll go shopping today and they better have my mustard on the shelf!