My brain seems to have latched on to a different meaning of the word “cold.” It understood, not the cold in the head I’ve been complaining about, but rather winter’s cold. It came up with this dream...
We’re booked on a flight—to New York, I think, from London, except that it’s certainly not Heathrow or any other airport that I know of anywhere near London. It has been snowing (hence the “cold”?) We arrive by car and find a spot in a parking lot not far from the airport. And thinking, for some reason, that we have ample time, we decide to leave the bags in the car and take the tube in to Victoria Station. Despite the weather, we have the notion to take the long walk from there up to Westminster Abbey (another brain misapprehension, I suppose, with the much-ballyhooed “Royal Wedding” happening this week!) then on down Whitehall and back via Buckingham Palace.
Absurd idea! We arrive at the crowded terminal and find the passengers for our flight gathering in a kind of tour group, ready for departure. Ellie checks the yellow file in which she always carries our travel information: the flight is scheduled for 3:25. I look at my watch. It’s already 3:30. But the young man who’s handling tickets and bags says brightly: It’s alright, you have another fifteen minutes.
So I have to run back to the car park to retrieve our bags, and it’s a whole lot further than I had imagined. I’m running down through the slushy snow and ice in a narrow alley, and realize I’m never going to make it. A cab comes around the corner to let out a passenger, and I seize the opportunity. The cabbie seems glad to have a fare, but he abandons his cab and instead brings over a tandem bicycle. I mount behind him, and we pedal madly on toward the car park.
Bags in tow, bumping along behind us in the snow, we head back for the terminal. The "cabbie" falls off the tandem and has a hard time getting back up: my rollie suitcase is incredibly heavy, and he grimaces and strains his back trying to get it back upright. The journey to the terminal, if you’ll forgive the pun, is interminable. And when we do arrive, the group of passengers has disappeared. No worries, though, Ellie spots us from a corner cafe and waves us over. I feel for my wallet, thinking that ten dollars will be a generous remuneration for the cabbie, but of course I can’t find it. Then I realize that I’m wearing a jacket, unusually, and that I put it in the inner breast pocket.
Relief! But then there’s the trouble fumbling for the right bills. I find a five, but otherwise it seems there’s only a twenty. But wait… sorting through a confusion of banknotes, I finally succeed in sorting out a four-dollar bill, and a two. Which would make eleven, more than I had planned to give him. No matter. No time to worry about it. I hand the man the bills and we join the party headed for the aircraft—again down narrow alleys filled with the debris of winter, snow, slush and ice...
Do we catch the flight finally? I have no idea. I awoke in a state of total exhaustion, recalling that the kitchen trash is overflowing and needs to be taken out.
Any dream interpreters out there?
Whenever you want to do a bodily action, you should reflect on it: 'This bodily action I want to do — would it lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both? Would it be an unskillful bodily action, with painful consequences, painful results?' If, on reflection, you know that it would lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both; it would be an unskillful bodily action with painful consequences, painful results, then any bodily action of that sort is absolutely unfit for you to do. But if on reflection you know that it would not cause affliction... it would be a skillful bodily action with pleasant consequences, pleasant results, then any bodily action of that sort is fit for you to do. -From the Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta: Instructions to Rahula at Mango Stone. Translated by Thanissaro BhikkhuThis same sutta instructs us further on the matter and I encourage you to read its entirety; it's not that long, really, I promise). However, since we can't always rely upon our mind and practice to interpret actions as either skillful or unskillful, we should check the conclusions we reached from contemplation against the experiences of wise ones. How do you know if said, "wise ones" are indeed, wise and trustworthy? Well, try investigating the Cula-punnama Sutta for answers, which says:
And how is a person of no integrity endowed with qualities of no integrity? There is the case where a person of no integrity is lacking in conviction, lacking in conscience, lacking in concern [for the results of unskillful actions]; he is unlearned, lazy, of muddled mindfulness, & poor discernment. This is how a person of no integrity is endowed with qualities of no integrity. -From the Cula-punnama Sutta: The Shorter Discourse on the Full-moon Night. Translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.Keep in mind, however, that the Kalama Sutta isn't Buddha saying to go out and do whatever you want because the "Buddha said I didn't have to listen to anyone." That is not what he is saying. This sutta doesn't replace doctrines like the Four Noble Truths, the Three Jewels and the Eightfold Path, but it does give us a realistic blueprint for how to practice spirituality without being duped by charlatans and zealots.
I managed to lock myself outside of my house early this morning while investigating some birds sitting in the pine tree out in front of our house. I was wearing my pajama shorts and a t-shirt with my hair all wild looking from just waking up. And, I was barefoot!! I ended up walking a mile and a half on a rough, dirt path to reach my wife's place of work to get the spare key and a ride home!! 
Buddha's foundational teaching of interconnection and interdependence, or co-arising demands that we live in balance with the environment. If we are just as apart of a towering tree as it's leaves, then to recklessly destroy our forests, rivers and oceans is to slowly but exponentially kill apart of ourselves.
(The draft of a possible chapter for the book I'm working on)
I watched myself being rude last night. I don’t like myself when I’m rude. I usually manage to hide my impatience under a veneer of politeness, but there are times when the veneer wears off and the ugly truth reveals itself, and last night was one of them.
It was at the end of a seder—the Passover festival that celebrates the liberation of the people from the period of their bondage in Egypt. It’s a fine ritual. Though not Jewish myself, I believe I have participated in a seder almost every year for the forty I have spent with Ellie, who is. They say the Last Supper was a seder, and I recall the pleasure of my Christian father sitting down at Ellie’s father’s table, many years ago, both finding the common ground between their respective religious faiths. You don’t need to be a Jew to celebrate human freedom, and as we look around the world today we find the relevance of the seder in many different circumstances—not least in the turbulent Middle East, where many of the ancient animosities still roil.
But a man, as we were reminded in our ceremony last night, can be as much a slave to his own inner obsessions and personal flaws as to those who oppress him from outside. My work, over the past few years, has been in good part an attempt to free myself from the bad attitudes and habits that, in the Buddhist view, bring needless suffering into my life and restrict my ability to flourish in the work I’m given to do as a writer.
Chief among these is my impatience. It affects every aspect of my life, including my writing. It is rooted in part, as I have come to understand it, in that old “I have no right to be here” syndrome that became the Big Lie that I explored just a short while ago. The greatest challenge of my meditation practice is to take the time to be present in the here and now: to take the time, in the first instance, that is needed; and, when I do take the time, to prevent the mind from wandering off into the future, planning, writing, taking care of business that has absolutely no relevance to this present moment.
I believe—I flatter myself—that I have learned a lot from this practice, but obviously still not enough. Last night was evidence that I have a ways to go yet before I conquer this particular demon that haunts me.
The story is a sadly familiar one: I could hardly wait for the seder to end so that I could home. The past few days have been busy ones, and I have had several writing projects on my mind—including a catalogue text I have committed to, along with the next chapter (this one, it turns out!) in the book I’m trying to get written, and entries in my (now three!) blogs. For a variety of reasons, I have not had the time or the mind space to get the writing done, and my impatience to get back to work has kept building.
I was also, for the same reasons, feeling physically depleted. Last night’s seder was the second in two days. Out of mostly sheer greed, I had eaten more than I should have done, and had indulged in more glasses of wine than I should have done. I had begun to feel heavy and slothful, and impatient with my lack of simple good sense on this score, too. I was much aware that, if I was to get down to some work today, I was in need of an early night and a good, long sleep.
The service part of the seder ended. Conversations ensued. I got into a perfectly civil discussion about taxes with a friend who is a registered libertarian. There was much upon which we did not agree, but the tone was friendly. Dessert was served, and I tucked in with abandon. I declined the coffee, on the grounds that it would keep me up. And gradually we all got up to leave…
This is the point at which my impatience starts to show itself. There’s the joke about the difference between the Jew and the Englishman: the Englishman sneaks away without bothering to say goodbye, while the Jew says goodbye and never leaves. Not to be prejudiced, but Ellie and I are a case in point. When I’m ready to leave, I’m ready to leave. Out the door, for me. Ellie is… different. Finality appalls her. She is reluctant, always, to say those last few words and actually leave.
Thus it was, last night, that I found myself still waiting to leave after having said my polite goodbyes all around. It was at that moment that a friend approached and asked me in the nicest and most genuine way possible how I was doing. We had not talked all evening, she said, and she was anxious to catch up. Well, I could easily have taken those few extra minutes to respond to her friendly interest, but instead I was frankly rude. Unresponsive. Unfriendly. Not that I actually said anything impolite, but my tone must have made my impatience clear as I muttered some of the explanations and excuses I have just outlined. But excuses just don’t hack it. They sounded hollow even to myself as I listened to them.
I felt bad about the whole thing, of course. It’s not how I wish to appear to others, not what I’d wish to recognize about myself. I believe in the possibility of change, and this is something about myself that I would truly wish to change. Am I better than I was ten years ago? I’d like to think I am, but then I watch myself in a situation of this kind and I realize that I’m right back where I started from.
This morning, out on our daily walk around the hill, we ran into a friend who was also, like ourselves, out walking his dog. I was anxious to get back home to work on this very essay that I’m writing now, and had put on hold, but we stopped for a chat. This is a wonderful opportunity, I told myself, to watch the breath, enjoy the morning air and the friendly exchange. I would not, I told myself, be the first to break up the conversation. And I watched with admirable equanimity at first as the level of impatience rose. I listened quietly as my mind started to insist that it was time to leave. I breathed. I watched myself as the conversation ran on—longer than necessary, in my judgment—and glanced at my watch and began to edge away compulsively…
Ah, well. I am sure there are those who share my seemingly incurable impatience. If not, you will surely have some weakness of your own that causes you to suffer unnecessarily, and may well stand in the way of your creative work. What’s important, I have come to realize, is not to keep doing battle to the death with this or any other demon; it’s rather to recognize its power and be aware of its intrusions. Because otherwise the feelings that accompany it—the anger, and perhaps the fear—get stored away in places where they dam up and block the flow without your realizing it. That’s when your demon becomes subtly harmful, and when you find yourself standing rather ridiculously in your own way.
