Actions on the Border of Decency

I arrived home very late last night after a great deal of travel. My life is increasingly shifting into the stage where it is us, the children, taking care of the parents. Both places to which I traveled involved such activities. Everyone is getting older. Infirmity is endemic, though it expresses itself to different degrees in the varied constitutions of the collected grandparents. Still, being of service to them, making efforts to be kind and supportive, seems to have helped my disposition towards practice.

I am supposed to be doing a lot of things vis à vis the wellbeing of others, and it hasn’t been going great for the past few years. Certainly not compared to the times where I was distressingly zealous. While I never reached vegan proselytizer levels of zeal, you would certainly know a lot about what I was studying should you have asked me even one innocent question. The upside was that I really did an amazing job improving my ability to donate, tip, and generally try to give things to those in need. It was a very helpful change in my life. I had been developing a great deal of background misanthropy, and having a set of clear guidelines to fight those tendencies helped me, and, I hope, others, a great deal.

As most good stories go, unfortunately, the good practice, the zealous boy, the cloud nine upon which I believed I could travel to the moon and sun, disappeared. Well, it was much more dramatic than that actually. Imagine prison guards helping you to escape a prison only to beat you to within inches of your life just as you were on the border, just as you were setting one foot outside the prison grounds. The people who had given me the framework to be a better person, to be kind and respectful and, some of you may have seen this coming, submissive to them for having such high qualities themselves, each took in turn a bespoke knife and plunged them into me.

I survived, but I did not want to. Through a lifetime of rigidity and self flagellation I managed to slow the degradation of my practice for a while, but even then I could feel that all that progress was going to die. To slough off, like some magic skin that had fooled not only the world, but me into believing I could be kind and good. And die it did, but, still, I could not. I had to live with the open wounds of betrayal as well as my own immense and multivalent failure. I had to watch as I became the slothful, depressed, hater of humankind I had so desperately tried to scrub from my self. Somehow, making things worse in a subtle way, adding that existential nausea to the gross grief of it all, I could not muster the concern to either delve fully into anti-human animosity, nor make an attempt to save what little good remained. I came loose from time, floating on it like a stream, catching glimpses of the sky, the shore, the rocks, but making no effort to understand or control the process of floating towards the terminal future.

Not to be excessively mercurial, but I must reorient us all towards what I had wished to be my main point: that things have, for the past few days, been getting better. I mentioned caring for elders, and it has done something important for me: I am finding the strength to undertake acts of kindness despite my inner sloth. I have been able to successfully fight against the voice that says, “Leave it,”, “It/they are not worth the trouble,” or “You don’t have any money to give!” Since public expressions of one’s good deeds are considered a bit gauche, if not downright deleterious to one’s practice, I shall only say there were some good successes: things were given despite my initial reactions. But there was one such act this morning that I think I will have to label as borderline.

“Bordering between what and what?” you might ask. In the very grossest sense, every action we do falls somewhere on a spectrum of pure selflessness to intense selfishness. In Buddhism, for very detailed reasons we shan’t get into here, it is actually considered impossible for unenlightened beings to undertake a completely selfless action. I can feel some truth to this: even when I am at my best, I have a wrong view of the self, and my ego is hanging around trying its damnedest to stealthily pat itself on the back. Still, I can recognize the difference between when I’m doing a good job of mitigating even that subtle selfishness, and when I’m just being a soulless black hole of thoughtless, cruel consumption. So somewhere around the impossibly neutral center of that line of action, on this morning, I vacillated intensely.

It was a strange feeling. Part of the discomfort of it stems from the setup. On a walk back to my home, in my lovely neighborhood in Los Angeles, I chanced upon one of those women that belongs in Los Angeles. Tall. Blond. A tennis skirt for someone of much less stature. A matching sports bra. Two items of visible clothing, no more. A leash and a dog. The leash was on the dog. But that’s all there was on this woman to whom various animal instincts now magnetized. The discomfort was all mine.The titillation is entertaining in a way, but the rest of the situation, my awareness of my position as a male, in a world with social mores, and of how my gaze is problematic, only added to the damning spiritual teachings that cover how a “good” person is supposed to behave in relation to desire. In short, I wanted to stare, I did not want to stare, I experienced inner conflict and a healthy dose of inwardly focused disgust. The woman and I were traveling on the same sidewalk in the same direction. I increased my pace, hoping not to reach her, so much as to quickly pass her and thereby remove her from my field of vision.

My strategy was working. Her dog had stopped to investigate some bouquet of smells centered around the root structure of a thigh high shrub, and the woman stopped to wait patiently. I took one, two, speedy steps past her, practicing the contemporary art of actively averting one’s gaze while desperately wishing not to be seen doing so. It was then I noticed something on the small strip of lawn to my left, pleasantly built into the sidewalk: a massive bottle of beer, basically empty, carelessly discarded, marring what was otherwise a beautifully maintained public space. My usual dualistic self began the process of tearing itself apart.

Had the woman not been there, I would likely have picked it up immediately. Or, wait a moment, if she had not been there would I have ignored it because there was no one to witness my good works? Some inner conclusion was reached before my conscious mind had had any time to come up with a plan of action. As such I nearly stumbled as I bent forward and launched out a hand, grappling the large bottle with agility and hoisting it off the ground. Time moves so much more quickly than I would like, both at the micro and macro scale: there had been no time to think, and I had acted. But the inner conflict continued. I wanted to be happy that I had done something to clean up the world. That I had undone some brute’s thoughtless sullying of the small bits of nature we still allow ourselves. But I could feel my desire. I wanted the attractive woman to have seen my action. Fantasized about hearing some sound that might indicate she appreciated what I had done. I immediately felt an ancient, practiced, almost welcome wave of self disgust wash over me. A tide of annoyance and irritation that only I could bring about. My whole inner world was not unlike a malevolent moon with an irregular orbit, pulling dark, poisonous waters over my soul. It clashed oddly with the soothing song of knowing that I was not untouched by some kind of compassion. Some kind of ability to push through germophobia and laziness and thus clean up after others, leaving the world just fractionally brighter.

I force marched myself away from the woman and the location whence the bottle had lain, struggling to settle the inner battle. Hoping now, more than anything else, that I could escape her view entirely so as to leave her completely untouched by my own general awkwardness. I’m not so self confident to think there was any chance at all of her being more than bemused for half a moment by my action (should she have noticed it), but that has never stopped me from spending inordinate amounts of time thinking about how to eclipse myself for the benefit of others. Thus it came to pass that for several minutes I walked briskly, mind a turbulent mess of conflicting thoughts and emotions, a small box of distressed limitation.

The whole experience, perhaps not longer than half a minute, left me marked. I know I wish to be a good person. Sometimes I am able to act well, for the benefit of others, even should it inconvenience me. But this strange concoction of both kindness and selfishness is probably one of the better examples of most of my actions. There is kindness in much of what I do. Sometimes that kindness is coming from a place of selfishness. Or perhaps a degree of selfishness. And it is because those two emotions cannot exist simultaneously that I am so distraught throughout the day. The storm tossed self, a small ship amongst towering waves of emotion, belief, fear, and more, cannot be at the peak of multiple waves, and so must dive and rise over and over, as it seeks some inner balance, some reasoning that might someday not only calm the sea, but lay bare its shadowed secrets.