Friday, March 24, 2023

 Friday, March 24, 2023

    While I had trouble sleeping Wednesday night, I slept like a dream last night. I don’t remember waking up at all in the middle of the night. When I did wake, I could hear the roosters crowing already, which meant it was past four am. I did some in-bed exercises before the regular alarm went off. I set an alarm for six am because I had arranged to call a friend. I considered texting to say I wanted to sleep in but thought better.

   Nowadays, Elsa comes to me for our morning routine. She sits at the edge of the bed. I check her for lesions and pour love into her with strokes and kisses. Next stop, the doggie door. Now that I throw a treat through the door, I don’t have to track her down.

   Then, we were off for our morning walk. I called my friend Carol. She and her husband, John, were heading to Home Depot. Carol works, really runs, a community garden in her town. A group of high schoolers would be visiting to do some work. Maryland requires high schoolers to do community service. Yay, Maryland!! She was heading there to buy more gardening gloves for the students and some lettuce seeds. I do wish I had anything close to her gardening skills. Most of the plants I plant die- even if I’m not the one to plant them and they grow like weeds without special care everywhere else.

 Carol is a member of a walking group. She met them in a yoga class, and they became friendly. I don’t know when or why they became a walking group. I suspect it had something to do with Covid. Every Thursday, they go out on a hike together. They became a group of people who also hang out together on other occasions.

   When I met with Adolescent D this afternoon. I told him how distressed I was by his unwillingness to do what he could to complete his homework. I asked if his fear of being weird only applied to his sense of what is weird or that of others. Did he realize that asking for a waiver on an assignment because you couldn’t think of anything was pretty weird? Thank God he did. I got him to the point where he recognized that his comfort zone was tiny, and his tolerance for leaving it was nonexistent. How much of this problem was created by his learning disability driving him inward, and how much of his mental state is a form of biological mental illness, a form of autism, perhaps?

   We did some work on the video assignment. I got D to ask me questions. He started asking me why I became a teacher. Wonderful question. While I had to encourage and cue him, he asked excellent questions. When I told him I majored in education, he was confused. It took me a minute. I realized for him, it was like saying I went to school to get an education. I explained the term to him. From there, I got him to think of someone he wanted to ask a question. He picked a schoolmate, possibly a friend. He wanted to ask why he cheated at everything, school and games.

   Then, I got him to pose questions for his uncle. We generated eleven questions, and he created at least eight on his own

      WHAT   WHEN   WHERE   HOW  WHY

 

1.                       What is your job? What do you do on your job?

2.                        Where do you work?

3.                       Who do you work for?

4.                       How much do you make?

5.                       What days do you work?   What is your work schedule?

6.                       Why did you get into this kind of work?

7.                       How did you get this job?

8.                       What was your experience before you got this job?

9.                       What skills did you need to get this job?

10.                     How do you like your work?

11.                     How do you like your bosses?

A slightly different slant on the non-self. Tonight, I read a new definition: being is a state where everything is good as is. We neither want something added nor taken away. This means ‘self’ is defined as that part of us that wants something different than what we have. It doesn’t address when that wanting is appropriate. For example, if I have a toothache, I think it is appropriate to want it to stop. Wanting it to stop makes me go to the dentist. If I ignored that want, there could be serious consequences. While I see the value of accepting what is, I don’t think the teachings address that hidden problem. Goenka did address it somewhat. He said, “You’re not a vegetable there to be sliced.”

  I heard another lecture on Buddhism at a Harvard site. The speaker said the Abrahamic religions focused on social change, changing the circumstances of life, while the Buddhist tradition focuses on inner transformation. We’re back to the Serenity Prayer: “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  In all the cases I’ve written about the past few days, ridding ourselves of self involves ridding ourselves of craving and aversion. There’s also the sense of self created by categorizing ourselves as women, daughters, wives, mothers, teachers, etc. If we cling to those definitions of self too tightly, I can see that we would suffer from craving- back to the drawing board.