Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?

What I was noticing with all this crazy weather (for those of you reading this in another place or another time, we are having snow and below-freezing temperatures here in Seattle) is how hard it is to not know.  Is it going to get worse?   Should I go home now?  Should we cancel classes?  Should I drive to work?  Is it going to freeze?  Is it going to get better?  Is it going to get better and then a little melty and then be frozen and way icier and worse?  I could feel my anxiety rising both yesterday and this morning as I tried to know what was going to happen and therefore what I should do, which is, of course, impossible.  I want to figure it out, but there’s no such thing—it turns out life is not like a math problem.

At some point, I just have to make a choice and see what happens.  What seems to make that even harder is the judgment that if I stay home or go home early and the weather turns out to be not such a big problem, then I’m a wimp, but if I go bravely out into the snow and get stuck somewhere I’m an idiot.  Not only is the choice between being a wimp and an idiot a crappy choice, but it’s not real.  For one thing, it’s based on the idea that I know (or should know) what’s going to happen.  And secondly, it’s making what happens mean something—that what happens with the weather and my car, for instance, means something about me.  The great thing about saying something out loud or writing down is seeing how ridiculous it is.

So the feeling of not-knowing is uncomfortable and I want to hurry up and make a decision so that I can know rather than waiting to see how things will develop.  I might even want to make up some rule, so that every time this situation arises, I just have to follow my rule—I can skip the whole not-knowing-what-to-do thing.  Or I can just keep reminding myself that there is no “right” thing to do and that I can only make the best decision I can make with the information I have at the moment and that, generally speaking, decisions are never quite as urgent as the sensations of anxiety would have me believe.

I think I will choose vairagya for our yoga word today.  It means non-attachment.  That can refer to a lot of things, but it has always seemed to me that the ultimate non-attachment is not attaching my sense of myself, my idea of who I am, my self-worth to things outside of me, like making the right decision or the weather.  I’m okay when it’s snowing, when I stay home, when I am anxious, when I don’t know.

Turning Toward

So I am just about done with the sweater and I can feel the inclination to put it away and not think about it anymore.  If I were going to guess what will happen, I will try wearing it once or twice because I put all that work into it and then it will go in a drawer and I will try to put the whole thing out of my mind.  Some part of me labels it as a “mistake” and a “waste of time.”  And since I don’t like how I feel with those labels, I want to avoid the thing that makes me feel that way, which is the sweater.  I was thinking this post was going to be about svadhyaya (self-study), but maybe it is also about dvesha (aversion, avoidance).

It makes me think of when I get a parking ticket.  It’s always my strategy to just pay it immediately, so that I don’t have to think about it and nothing will remind me.  I do think that it is a good plan in that situation—I made a mistake, I know what it was, I won’t do it again, be done with it.  Something like a parking ticket is easy to ruminate over (“I can’t believe I did that,” “Such a waste of money,” etc.), just making myself feel bad without any real purpose.

But there is a difference between dropping something or letting it go and pushing it away.  Letting it go (like the parking ticket) means I am not attached, particularly I am not attaching that thing to my sense of myself.  I am at the point where I don’t feel like getting a parking ticket means anything about me (I used to fall for that sort of nonsense, but not anymore).  When I am actively pushing something away or avoiding it, it’s because I am attached, I think it means something about it me and I don’t like it.  In my case, that’s the sweater.

So, the problem is that pushing away the things that are troublesome to me guarantees that they will remain.  If I just put my sweater in the drawer without spending any time looking at what I could have done differently, what I need to learn more about or practice, what specifically I don’t like about it, then the likelihood that I will have another unsuccessful sweater experience is much higher.  Turning away from things that are difficult or unpleasant keeps them in place—my best opportunity for change is to turn toward them.  Interestingly, brain research has shown that meditators have a shift in prefrontal cortex function from right side (avoidance) to left side (approach), which is associated with decreasing depression, anxiety, etc.

In the end, there is no problem with putting my sweater in the drawer or even deciding that I will just stick to socks and scarves and fingerless mitts.  But not if it’s just because I feel like I can’t or am afraid to look at it.  I can turn toward the sweater (or the anger or the difficult relationship or the fear or “bad habit” or whatever is causing me suffering) and see what I can see, be open to what I might learn, take responsibility for my actions, do my self-study.  And then let it go.  I don’t need to keep replaying it and berating myself—what’s done is done.  Then I get to do that whole process again next time it comes up, which could be in the next few minutes or a couple months from now—things like that don’t generally change immediately.  But what does change immediately is that the moment I turn toward it, I am not suffering.  I am in a place of curiosity, openness and acceptance and whatever it is does not have power over me.  And then, like magic, it doesn’t actually matter what happens with it.

The Learning Curve

So after I posted yesterday, I sat on the couch with all the pieces of the first sweater that I have knitted that has to be sewn together (my first two were knit all in one piece).  And as I was starting the project of seaming, my husband was describing this opportunity that he missed at his new job because he just had no idea how things worked.  We both were in agreement that it was just part of the learning curve and there’s no way to know all of these things until they happen.  Then I proceeded to get really frustrated that I didn’t really know how to sew these seams.  I looked it up on a few websites to find tips and advice, but it was kind of hard and not working at first.  It was apparent that while it was easy to have understanding for someone else in their learning curve, I still somehow expect that I won’t have one.

What I thought was sort of interesting was that it wasn’t so much that I was feeling bad because I thought I should already know how to do it (which is a common one, I think), but that because I am smart and generally capable, I should just be able to, that it shouldn’t be hard.  I don't know how, but it will be easy (a slightly different variation on the theme).  It turns out that I am just a regular person who has a hard time the first time I do something, just like I have been talking about.  I remember someone saying that everyone wants to be extraordinary, but the most extraordinary thing is being ordinary. 

So, of course, I stuck with it (the seaming) and got the hang of it, though I suspect it will look like my first seamed sweater (if it even fits—there may be another blog coming soon on that).

Not Giving Up

A while ago, I posted about being bad at something before you can be good at it. And a reader commented and I’ve been wanting to comment on the comment, but haven’t yet. And now today, it seems like the day. The getting from not being able to do something to being able to do it, as the insightful reader noted, requires not giving up. I think it is probably impossible to do something over and over again (as long as we are paying attention) and not improve. Which doesn’t mean I am going to be a virtuoso or expert, but it’s going to get easier and more streamlined. That’s just the way the brain works—it’s going to build a neural pathway for what I do repeatedly.

Now, unfortunately, what many of us have repeated and practiced is thinking, “This is never going to work,” “I can’t do this,” or “If I can’t be great at it, what’s the point?” So what we’re good at is thinking we’re not good at things. But we also have loads of evidence to the contrary. And if you are reading this and thinking, “No I don’t,” recall that you once didn’t know how to talk or walk or read or write. It’s incredible how much we are capable of!

So then the question becomes, “How do I stick with something?” Generally, when I am not as good at something, it’s not quite as enjoyable as when I am, but enjoyability is the main thing that motivates me to do something in the present moment. If I can pay attention to the little incremental changes I am making, it starts to be more enjoyable because I am focusing on what I can do instead of what I can’t. If I pay attention to what is happening right now, I am having more fun than when I am focused on some future place I want to be or some idea of what should be happening.

I didn’t have in mind what the yoga concept would be here (it could, of course, be tapas, but we’ve talked about that a lot lately)—now I am thinking of the sutra that says, “vitarka badhane pratipaksha bhavanam” (when disturbed by troubling thoughts, cultivate the opposite). If I have the habit of giving up or focusing on what’s not going well, I can create a new pattern, change my perspective and have a new experience. And, of course, at first that’s going to be hard and I won’t be very good at it.

Pretty much, the whole Samarya Center (click here if you haven’t heard of it) is an example of what can happen when you stick with something. The part that popped into my head earlier today is the kirtan that I have been leading once or twice a month since we opened almost ten years ago. In the beginning, I would often have one or two people and there must have been times that no one came. And now, there are regularly twenty or more people, which is always amazing to me (and someone recently asked if we could Skype the kirtan to her small rural town!). Looking back, I think about how easy it would have been anywhere along the way to think that it wasn’t worth it or it just wasn’t working. I kept doing it because every time I was packing up my guitar, I was thinking that I had a good time.

We don’t know for sure what the final result will be if we keep working at something, but we do know for sure what will happen if we give up.