A few weeks ago, I began attending Tuesday night teacher-led sits at
New York Insight Meditation Center. A recent one was led by a charismatic older guy who bore a passing resemblance to Tommy Lee Jones -- which would have kept me entertained no matter what he said -- and his dharma talk for the evening was about patience, the noblest or highest of four or six something-or-others. (Buddhism has a number of lists, apparently, and I'm not really familiar with any of them yet.)
Anyway, patience seems to amount to a sort of
skillful inaction, where we are presented with an offending stimulus and the usual reaction might be one of anger, indignation or perhaps even violence. Exercising patience doesn't entail just remaining silent while fuming underneath or desperately trying to keep the lid on a boiling cauldron -- it is tantamount to
giving a gift of love, forgiveness or what-have-you. I am all for this. The temptation is to react (a la scratching an itch), and the skillful response is one of non-reaction.
However, when talking about this stuff I think it's easy to lose sight that judgments are often difficult to make in the heat of the moment, and that non-action (or a delayed action) isn't necessarily the best decision even in a Buddhist context.
For example, one will witness an injustice being done, and the temptation might be to lash out at the offending party, to crush them and make them feel small. Teach them a lesson. Tit for tat. Equally misguided, however, might be to stand there and do nothing, which I think is the more tempting option when one's own well-being isn't directly threatened.
It doesn't even have to be a question of intervention; often we'll be presented with opportunities to get closer to our goals somehow -- business/networking opportunities, or a potential connection with a great girl, for example -- and the temptation for introverts like myself is to do nothing. Perhaps we could justify non-action after the fact by claiming patience; after all, we don't want to react with greed or lust. If it's gonna happen, it'll happen. In due time. This is called
inertia -- in physics, the tendency for an object at rest to resist motion.
I hope I'm starting to make clear what my dilemma is. It is all too easy to say,
this was an example of patience, that was an example of inertia, and how do we tell?
Well, patience is skillful inaction while inertia is unskillful inaction. Okay, then what is skillful?
Well, skillful decisions yield better results than unskillful ones. Now we are talking about results, which is dangerous because using results to evaluate process retrospectively merely begs the question and sheds no light on how we can be skillful in the uncertainty of here and now.
To be sure, Buddhist meditation can help us liberate ourselves from the regrets caused by inertia -- but I am more interested in constructing a guide for action, not just a better way of interpreting the past.
Life tends to present to us certain gifts and opportunities when we least expect them and are least prepared to accept them -- for they are often shrouded in apparent risk. However, it is perhaps only with the cultivation of mindfulness and self-love that we can learn to see through the apparent threats to self and recognize: these are gifts (for a limited time only) and for freak's sake, we deserve them.
So, how can we know if we are being
skillful without relying upon the lens of results? That is really what it comes down to. To be continued....
