Bear with me. This is a longish entry, and kind of complicated. So the past few days I've had this terrible thing on my mind.
It's an argument I've been having, at a distance, with someone I love very much.
I got a good sleepless night out of it Monday night, and then had a shoddy, not-really-spoonful workday out of it yesterday. What the argument's about doesn't even matter. Nor does who it's with, nor my position on the issue, versus theirs. It's not worth rehashing even a little bit.
So why am I bringing it up? Because I'm grateful for how I've managed to transcend it, this morning.
My friend Shokolada and I often have fairly deep philosophical conversations. He lamented to me once that one of the things that make the eastern philosophies I'm so enamored with kind of a drag is that ultimately, you have to rely upon yourself. There's no other person, entity, resource, guidebook, scripture, guru, or even deity to turn to. In the end, you have to do your own heavy lifting. Shok thinks that's kind of blah.
He's not wrong, either.
Mindfulness is a practice. Even when someone else teaches you about the practice, it's you who has to do it. And, as work goes, the sort of chilly, bleak news about the work is once you begin it, you only have to do it until you're dead. (Maybe after, I'm not sure yet.)
OK, so back to my issue at hand. I got a good big case of the I'm-Very-Disappointed-In-This-Person's about the person in question, and proceeded to rant about it for about a day and a half to other folks I care about. It's painful. Although I didn't want to admit it to myself, the source of that pain is mostly the guy writing this blog entry. I had an expectation that wasn't meeting with how things really are. It was my dissastifaction about that expectation that was hurtful to me. I desperately wanted this person to see how wrong they were, and how right I was.
That's really kind of silly. It's human, but silly. This morning I remembered why.
Specifically, I remembered this telling of a zen story, "You Are Right." Go ahead and read it, if you like. It sums up far more succinctly why I was being silly.
Today I feel light, easy. I'm not worried about being right. I don't need to be. I realize that when I'm functioning well, I have no arguments.