Car-ma
It's apt that I'm writing about my bumbling attempts to learn to express my anger in my proposal. It seems I have lots of opportunities to practice lately. The most recent is the fender bender I was in this morning. It was not yet 5:30am and I got rearended. (Some friends have already told me that the moral of the story is that I should never get up that early.) I was waiting to make a right at a red light when it happened. For those of you keeping score, this is the third accident I have been in in 18 months. It is the third accident that was the other guy's fault. For a change of pace, it was the first accident that was not a hit and run.
I'm sure the guy was wishing he had run, though. I got really pissed off, especially when he 1) tried to introduce himself to me and shake my hand (I just looked at him and said, "I'm not interested in meeting you." This wasn't a play date.), 2) suggested about 3 times that we move off the street we were on--and onto one that was far busier (I said, with increasing force each time, that we weren't going anywhere; it was 5am so there wasn't much traffic, and the other street was busier anyway; and I'm realizing after the fact that I didn't want him getting back in the car because that's what the other two guys did--said they wanted to pull over to a safer spot--right before they took off), and 3) started calling me Valerie after I gave him my information (okay, pal, we are NOT on a first name basis, and using my first name is not going to endear you to me regardless of what you might have read in your Psych 101 textbook. It's actually going to make me want to rip your face off. It always makes me cringe a little when I hear people use a server's name if they see it on the name tag. I don't know exactly why I don't like it, but I don't.).
I am very grateful that I'm not hurt, which I'm not, and that it looks like the damage to the car is mostly cosmetic, though I have to get that checked out. Well, let's rephrase that. I know it's appropriate to be grateful; let's put it that way. I'm just not FEELING grateful yet. I'm trying to get there, but this is the latest in a long line of things that are making me feel put upon the past couple months.
The whole situation and the way I've been feeling lately makes me wonder about my karma, what I'm doing to bring this crap to me. I guess I don't get a pass on having to deal with bad stuff even though I am working hard on understanding myself and evolving, blah blah blah, but it still sucks to have to deal with. I've decided to try to shake things up a little bit. I'm going to Ojai on Thursday to get some reiki from my friend Jon. I'm going out of town on Sunday for a week to clean out my storage locker in Chicago. (I had a session with Nora the other day, and she said that's going to be huge for me energy-wise.) I'm having ice cream for dinner. (Okay, that's not really that unusual.)
In better news, I finished the latest draft of my proposal and am going to send it to my agent after one last proofread. I like it, I think. It's hard to tell because I'm so mired in it. But there are parts that are funny. We'll see what Jason says.
Also, HUGE congrats to Marcel and Jenny, who are expecting their first angry, slanted baby late this year! Thus continues Marcel's evolution into Cuddly Teddy Bear Man.
posted by Valerie @ 9:23 AM
1 Comments:
I was thinking about that old Zen story this morning - the one about the two monks crossing a creek, with one monk helping (carrying) a young lady in her finery across the creek so her finery wouldn't get soiled.
The monk who didn't carry the lady was fuming for hours thereafter because Vinaya rules forbid touching women, even though by our standards carrying her was pretty innocent.
The monk who carried the lady finally turned to his companion and said "I stopped carrying that lady way back at the creek - why are you still carrying her?"
I was thinking about that story this morning because I had a bad rolling experience with a more senior student last night in which he was pretty merciless, verging on hazing.
Naturally I forgot the two good rolls that followed - competitive but not brutal, in which I did well - and focused only on the brutal roll with the senior student and how lacking my jiu jitsu skills are.
Hence the Zen story came to mind.
Then I read about your car accident and thought - gosh I'm bad, but she's worse. (You are my hero for being a shit magnet and pulling away my self-pity into "other" pity. - insert ironic self mocking tone.)
As I read your narrative, the accident seemed minor. Unexpected, messes up your cross fit workout or something similar - I doubt you got up because you like to get up early. But in the big scheme of things very, very minor.
A pure accident, not an assalut. And the guy, although bordering on creepy, seemed to be going out of his way to try to be nice. Hey, some people would have said "you jerk, why'd you stop so suddenly" and try to blame you instead.
Then I realized. These are our stupid human tricks. We need to feel important, special - on birthdays we need to celebrate, when bad things happen (be they bad rolling or fender benders) we need to amplify their significance to prove that God Hates Us. We are special enough to be on His radar, and He's gunning for us.
In reality I just don't think we are that important to be singled out for praise or blame whether by God or by our fellow man. While I don't subscribe to the Camus theory that life is just meaningless tedium, I do subscribe to the Zen theory that we tend to haul our mental and emotional baggage along with us way too long.
Hey, I should have been smoking mad after the way I was treated last night. For about five minutes, then moved on. Instead I was "calm" but at another level it festered and wouldn't leave me alone.
So I have anger issues - I am unwilling to let myself blow up a little, secretly, inside, where it doesn't have social consequences. But I am oh too willing to nurse a grudge and let it "poison" my perception of what BJJ means to me.
Finding the right way to proceed is a challenge. I don't know if it's good or bad to come to this conclusion so late in our growth cycle. We should have figured this out as children, yet here we are as adults blogging about it. And the typical jiu jitsu person - younger than us - they probably lack the self-awareness to even ponder these types of questions.
We are clearly better than angry limb rendering chimpanzees (the more I read about chimpanzees the less I like them, and the more I read about humans the more they seem all too like chimpanzees). But sometimes not by much.
We have to stop the endless cycle of talking ourselves into bad moods.
I suspect that the amount of energy it would take to make ourselves happy is probably actually less than the amount of energy we merrily spend to make ourselves foul-mooded.
We should make better use of our lives.
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