Wit and Wisdom #3

Buddhism Meets The Mature Driver Improvement Course

“Don't they know who I am?"
(Anonymous)

My insurance agent said I could save 5% on my annual vehicle insurance if I took a Mature Driver’s Course, an eight hour lecture thing at some local high school. I had no idea that the course would be as interesting and as enlightening as it was. I just thought, “Oh, shite, I’m over 55 and they think I’m getting slow and dotty.” I learned two things of immense importance during my eight hours. First, I’ve lost about 5 degrees on each side of my peripheral vision. That means I need to crane my neck further at stop signs, especially on my motorcycle. Second, or ‘b’, I learned that the genesis of most road rage is a result of deeply held beliefs. Not the deeply held beliefs like those in, God and Country and Yale, but the kind that make us insane when we’re behind the wheel.

For example, it is the deeply held belief that I am an especially deserving person, entitled if you will, that makes me nuts when someone cuts me off or won’t let me merge onto my God-given segment of the freeway. That same belief underlies my rage when somebody tries to merge onto my freeway space. Somewhere in my lizard brain a voice cries out, “Don’t they know who I am?!”

What made this part of the Driver Improvement Course particularly interesting was the fact that, since 1996 my Buddhist practice has been trying to unravel all of those whacked-out lizard brain beliefs. To my great relief, my experiences with my own road rage have been becoming fewer and further between. I have actually begun to laugh at myself and the ego that I have spent so many years perfecting. It turns out that I am not really special at all. I have no rights on the freeway that are more important than anyone else’s. Moreover, my superior education and years of road experience do not combine to enable me to become an ethical behavior cop. It is not my job to teach anyone else how he or she should drive.

It is sufficient that I do my best not to take myself so damned seriously, leave earlier to make my appointments, and avoid eye contact with anyone who suffers from an acute attack of hating me for being ahead of him/her at the toll booth.

This way I may avoid an early death and if I do it really well, I might even become enlightened in this lifetime.

Wit and Wisdom #2

Me and Me

“I may not be much, but I think about myself all the time…”
(Anonymous)

For most of my life I was not at all sure who I was much less who was in charge of my head. From the moment of my birth my mind seemed to be using me and I often felt like an unwilling rider on the tiger behind my eyes. My mind, or some wild part of it, was always going places without me and coming up with strange and wonderful thoughts without any conscious effort on my part. There were even times (cf. “Puberty and Me”) when I imagined my mind must be located in places other than behind my eyes.

I was five years old when I first asked my parents, “Who’s in charge of my brain while I’m asleep? Does The Sandman bring a different Victor who takes over when I drift into Dreamland? And if that’s true, is he or she or it playing for my team or is he or she or it trying to scare the BeJesus out of me? Why would a well-meaning part of me create crocodiles to chase me through midnight black palm trees until dawn’s early light? What’s up with that?” My parents told me I was a worry-wart and to stop thinking about things that had no answers.

But I did not stop thinking about me and my mind. I didn‘t know it at the time, but I couldn’t have stopped thinking about myself if my life had depended on it.

To make things more complicated, in the first grade, I became aware of some sort of thinking part of me that kept me awake before I ever got the chance to sleep. It refused to shut up. This “Bad Cop” part of my brain kept giving me the Third Degree: “Have you put your homework inside your spelling book?” And, “Are you sure you were supposed to color British Guiana blue?” My ordinary brain (the part I had assumed was “me”, whoever the hell that was) usually replied, “Yes, I put the homework inside my spelling book and of course British Guiana is supposed to be blue---it’s always blue.” Unfortunately, these simple affirmations were never enough for the Bad Cop me whose sole purpose on earth was to keep me in a perpetual state of anxiety, warning me I was going to get caught short in school, be publicly humiliated and found wanting.

Thus it was that by the time I was seven I was totally and terminally fascinated by what was going on inside my own head---this committee of “me’s” which was always in session. It would be the beginning of a lifelong relationship and an endless source of amusement, pleasure and pain. It would not only give me something to think about and speak about, it would give my friends and family something to wonder at in awe and disbelief. I was, perhaps, the most self-involved person they had ever met. I have to say I was very proud that I had become best at something.

Soon I became all-too familiar with the look of shock on perfect strangers’ faces when they realized I was only pretending to pay attention to them while speaking to them. I was much too interested in how I must look to them, whether I was impressing them, whether I measured up. I was also making up whole stories about who they were, what they were doing, what they were thinking and what they did when the lights went out. Whatever the reality of these “others” in my life might have been, I much preferred my version and started to write down my observations based on nothing more than what I had dreamed up. As the center of my own universe, I was Philosopher King, Head Sachem, Chief Scribe and the perennial winner of the Mr. Congeniality Award.

I loved it because I was totally convinced that everyone was as fascinated by me as I was.

Nothing on this planet could have undone my interlocking conglomerate of inaccurate assumptions---nothing, that is, except having adolescent children. Imagine my shock and horror when my two growing sons advised me that I was in error about everything. Oh, my friends, mighty was the struggle waged in my self-referential universe. It went on for years until finally I had to agree that my sons were right.

I really was clueless.

I have to tell you this revelation has made my life a walk in the park. My wife, my children, my co-workers, have all become much more interesting and they appear to like me more---now that I actually listen to them. I have also discovered, after many hours of sitting on my crimson meditation mat, that this thing I have been calling my mind is neither as complex nor as fascinating as I had once thought. For the most part, it is, as Alice said, when she became enlightened, “…a pack of cards…”

So. How are you doing? No, really…