Carrying The Old Woman

Today I was thinking of a variation of an old zen story. 

In the story, two traveling monks reached a river where they met a woman. The woman was wealthy and had porters for her litter, but the porters were afraid to cross the river carrying their mistress. The woman was bitter and cursed the servants. When she saw the two monks, she angrily demanded that they carry her to the other side. 

The young monk hesitated, uneager to help someone who appeared so spiteful, yet the old monk silently picked her up onto his shoulders, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other bank. She did not thank him. Instead she continued to spit venom at the monk, complaining and cursing as he walked away. 

.

As the monks continued on their journey, the young monk was brooding and preoccupied. 

Unable to hold his silence, he spoke out.

"That woman was cruel, and when you helped her, she offered you no gratitude. Instead she cursed you. You should not let her treat you that way."

"Brother," the second monk replied, "I set her down on the other side, while you are still carrying her."

I learned long ago that the way people treat you has little to do with your actions or your value as a human being. Our ego, constantly insists that we deserve respect. So much so, that we think this is the calculation of our worth. 

What I have found in my two careers as a journalist and as a nurse is quite different:

People will yell at you whether you do the right thing or the wrong thing.

People will resent you whether you tell them the truth or a lie.

People will treat you cruelly whether you help them or harm them.

Thus, if their treatment of you is independent of your actions, you should not let their attitude dictate how you proceed in the world. Particularly in nursing, people come into our care with a lifetime of emotional pain that we cannot expect to repair in our short encounter with them. Some live lives so fettered by darkness that they develop antibodies to kindness and light. 

People so often treat the world based on their pain and their ego, not on the human being in front of them. So we should not let their behavior dictate ours. Nor should we take personally the condition of their soul. They may have been broken long before you encountered them and they likely will be broken when you walk away. 

In the meantime, you do what is right, because it is right not because of expected praise or gain. The elder monk did not expect kindness from the rich old woman, nor did he let it bother him. 

We should help, we should be kind, we should tell the truth, we should do the right thing not in some expectation of reward, but rather, because it is the right thing. 

It is OUR actions that define us. Because we are kind, because we are truthful, we do not allow others to germinate unkindness, mendacity or cruelty within us. 

It is easy to allow mistreatment to fester in us, to claw at our awareness such that we do not see everything good around us. Resentment is a handicap to living. 

Ed's Note: The version of this story is from Zen Shorts a book by John J. Muth. The original story referred to a religious prohibition of monks touching women. Muth's version is much more helpful and the book is wonderful. 

Tinker's Lament

If I have one sin

I like to take it apart

Put it back together again

I could buy shiny an new

But I'd rather have rust

and a dent or two

I can't leave it alone

Got to see how it runs

Got to get my fingers dirty

therein lies the fun

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

"When I find myself asking what have I gotten myself into, that's when I know I'm on the right path."

My wife said this the other day while we were talking with some friends.

I often felt this way when I was in nursing school. Quitting my job and going to nursing school was a major change of course for our family. I was the sole breadwinner with an established career. I had with two other mouths to feed and another on the way.  It was an economic gamble as well as incredibly stressful event in our lives.

It was a challenge, and we need to have challenges. 

Getting in over your head is how you learn to swim, and learning to swim is how you discover that other two-thirds of the world are covered in water. Learning and doing new things is how we grow.  It is not always filled with sweetness and light. Moreover, it is by necessity less comforting that staying in your rut and on your couch. 

The biggest confrontation I faced in nursing school was one of identity. 

I was a Writer (note the capital "W") for more than a decade. My words and creativity provided my sole source of a meager income. I edited and taught other young writers how to hone their craft of reporting and writing clearly and effectively. I appearing on talk shows and live gabfests as a pundit. I was good at my job and derived egotistical pleasure from the praise I received.

Giving all that up was hard. It wasn't just a different work schedule and routine. It was a major change in who I thought I was and what I thought I was capable of accomplishing. It was a direct challenge to the stories I told about myself. I even found myself rewriting my personal history - not inventing fiction, but noticing and emphasizing events in my life that reinforced the new "who I am" story. I reached back in my life for stories to reassure me that this was a path that I should be on.  

For when we leave our comfort zones, we are often confronted with how much of who we think we are is an artificial construct. 

Throughout our lives we make up stories about who we are. Things happen and we create a shorthand explanation for the path on which we find ourselves. We are constantly asking and answering the question "how did I get here." I am someone who can't do math - and that's why I didn't become an astronaut. I went into journalism because no one would hire me to do anything else. 

 It is the simplistic story we tell others, but if repeated often enough, our story is a big part of who we are. Our identity. 

As we grow older we create our identity through stories. The labile emotions of teenagers and young adults are lives that lack such stories as anchor points. We drift. We experiment. We substitute affectation -- trends clothes, and tribes of culture. Even our addictions become entwined with how we view ourselves. Notice how often people say "I am a smoker" rather than "I smoke cigarettes." We become what we say we are - to ourselves as well as others. Eventually we gather enough things that feel right and call it our story. 

That's fine, until you throw in a plot twist. 

Changing direction is a challenge to who you think you are. 

Facing a challenge in life -- doing or learning a new thing once your story is set -- requires us to overcome the narrative inertia that has taking the dear reader along a certain path for as long as you've been alive. It is hard to starting thinking of yourself as a new person, an alternate protagonist sowing chaos amid the predictable plot points thus far established. 

Those new plot developments are often for the better. The protagonist grows and sees-feels-learns something new about themselves, and the world. 

As such, it can be frustrating, but thrilling as well. 

what is poetry

poetry is 
playing with words
to make them say
what words 
can never say