A few months back I had sat-in on a zoom class at the Wat. The class was shown a cute little animation film that you can see here and then asked to contemplate on it. Mae Neecha shared a technique, an approach to identifying a core issue in a story, that she had been using recently. She advised you could strip out a lot of the details of a story, of our emotions and reactions to that story, and try to see what was happening in terms of the elements and natural processes.  

I found the idea deeply compelling for a few reasons: 1) If I can take a situation and understand it at a core level, see how it relates to overarching themes in nature, I can learn to apply it to many stories, to my own dramas and wrong views, and more easily identify the patterns in the stories that strike or plague me.

2) If I can distill the stories I get caught-up in, that I am emotional about, to a basic idea prevalent in nature, I can see that there is nothing special about me, or my stories. The suffering and struggles I experience, and personalize, are just normal parts of this world. In many ways, this was at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching to Kisa Gotami and that has always been a powerful teaching to me.

During the class, folks –including myself — struggled a bit on how to apply Mae Neechas’ technique. Now, as I was sitting in an airport, waiting to board a flight, my mind went back to the teaching and I decided to consider the video again and see if I could strip out the details and characters, identify the core issue and find that issue in nature and the elements.  

As I was considering, boarding was getting started: The flight was clearly nowhere close to full. I was in boarding group 5. I kept moving up as the line was progressing, but there was a handful of passengers being what I thought was super self-righteous, not wanting to move forward as 5 hadn’t been called yet, and they didn’t want to skip in line. Only there was no line, they were just holding up boarding processes for everyone…

Worse, they asked my group. Since I was in 5, like them, they kept questioning if I should be moving forward, they kept trying to make me feel bad for breaking the order. I was so annoyed. When I got on the plane I started to think: 

What is the stripped-down issue: Adaptation to an environment. And what is the truth of nature? Sometimes nature adapts quickly — Animals will move to new environments when they run out of food, they migrate. Sometimes things in nature adapt slowly, new genetic characteristics can come to species after many generations. Even death, cessation is a form of adaptation, the elements, if they can no longer be sustained in a certain form, they return to the earth so a new form can be born. The banks of a river slowly adapt to the movement of water through erosion. Or a river can adapt quickly to something like excess rain and flood. Everything adapts at its own rate, so why be so annoyed, slighted, at these folks at the boarding gate who were slower to adapt to a mostly empty flight than I was? 

I thought back to the goat story too and realized I could apply this concept of adaptation there as well. Adapting walking stye to suit the environment. I considered when I was like the small goat –reluctant to change my style: When I got to NY, folks interacted more curtly, more quickly, but I didn’t want to adapt. I identified with my way, the slow, casual, open San Franer way that I thought it proved something about me, about my identity. By resisting, refusing to adapt, I was avoiding the assumption of the identity of NYer and clinging to the identity of an SFer.

In fact, when I really consider that time in my life, I realize I felt like I had to hate NY –despite all the pain it caused me — in order to resist ‘becoming’ a NYer and losing my SF identity. The truth though is that NYers are just folks who have adapted behavior to a certain environment. SFers are just folks who have adapted behavior to a certain environment. If the environment changes, isn’t it normal for behavior or state to change? Why is this adaptation upon changing cities something I feared, why is this something I made into a referendum on myself and who I am

I put myself then in the shoes of the old goat now, feeling slighted, lesser, that my way, that worked so well for so long was no longer effective. How it made me feel brought low. While I lived in SF, I had thought I had figured out my life, I was calm, chill, equanimous. But faced with a new environment, I was slow to adapt and I felt a combination of pains: Hate for my new environment because it was an affront to who I thought myself to be and hate for myself for not being able to adapt to this new environment the way that a chill, equanimous, SFer SHOULD be able to do. Talk about a no win: I feared losing my SF identity and at the same time feared that the inability to adjust, and ultimately lose that identity in favor of a NY identity made me a failure as well.

Now, when I think in terms of adaptation, I think, “why should I have refused to adapt when adaptation is the course of nature?” “And why should I feel low, ego beaten, when I find I am not the master of my ‘life walk’ like the old goat, when faced with a new environment life NY?” Its normal to need to adapt, this isn’t about me, or my ego, or my identity..

 Back when I was in the throws of NY depression, I reflected that the wrong view that prompted my move from SF to NY was not seeing I was just like an orchid: I could thrive in one environment, like SF and moved to a new one, like NY, and I could wither. It had been egotistical to believe that there was something innate in myself that made me a thriver/survivor in every situation.

Now I realize this is true, but I still didn’t get the point; after I moved I felt so defeated, like such a bad Buddhist and bad person that I couldn’t keep my equanimity and cool. I felt it was all about me, an indictment of me. If I really understood the orchid though I would realize there is nothing so special about being unable to adapt quickly. Somethings adapt quickly. Some things adapt slowly. Somethings, unable to adapt die and then their elements are recycled –adapted –into a new form.

I considered the boarding process again. I realized there were actually 2 issues at work:

1) I was upset at the fellow passengers for not adapting at my pace, to my standards. But everything adapts according to its causes. A fire will move and adapt to fuel or wind far more quickly than a river bank that slowly erodes/adapts and takes new shapes based on the water that flows over it over a long time. Its just the circumstances, the character of the form, the specifics of its particular state.

2)I felt the reluctant boarders were indicting me. I considered why it bothered me so much and I realized: I want to be a considerate person. I see consideration as a lynchpin of my identity and a key element in having a ‘safe’ world; consideration, in my mind, proves that everyone is regarding one another and that helps keep the world an orderly and not violent place. In this instance, my identity as a considerate passenger, as an upholder of a value I cling to, was challenged. I saw the reluctant boarders as failing to adapt, but I felt self-conscious that they saw me as inconsiderate –that I saw myself as inconsiderate and they were affirming that. 

Now, I started seeing a pattern: This is not the first time 2 competing issues, 2 competing senses of self had created discomfort for me:

As I said, in NY I was an angry-ny-hater alana to protect myself from losing my SF chill identity, but then I was also disappointed with myself for being a bad buddhist, a bad alana whose hater ways meant I  couldn’t remain equanimous.

At the boarding gate, I was an alana trying to keep the boarding process smooth so that I could protect my time from boarding  delays, and so I can protect my bag from getting confiscated because the boarding time is running low. But I felt a challenge to being able to protect my identity as a considerate alana.

This all brings me back to the story that launched my practice, homeless alana. I wanted to be a kind compassionate alana, but I also want to keep this physical body safe.

So is there a theme I can now see in my stories? I want to protect, preserve, maintain my identities and my belongings. But can I maintain? Preserve? Not lose? If I am continuously put in a position of trade-offs, needing to let go of one thing I cling to in order to ‘keep’ another, it proves to me that nothing can be kept. If it could, there would be no choices to make –all the things I grap and cling to, rupa and nama alike, would just stay with me.

But, in truth, as circumstances change, as the causes for losing this thing, or that thing, or both are met, the loss will occur. This is inevitable. I struggle and suffer these deep internal conflicts, impossible choices, as I weigh what I imagine are tradeoffs to loose one thing to keep another. To lose consideration to keep my stuff. To lose my good Buddhist identity to keep my SFer identity. To loose compassion to keep health.  I stress, and suffer as if it really were me, the choices I make, that actually had the power to preserve at least one of these things I value.  Again ignoring the fact that if it were up to me, there would be no choice, I would have it all.

The sun is the sun, the center of the solar system, till it burns out. A tree can have all its leafy glory, till chill comes in the fall. A glacier can hold on to all its mass of ice till global warming melts the ice. A river can keep all its water till excess water causes an overflow. The earth can keep all its magma till excess pressure builds and forces it out as a volcano. As soon as the circumstances change, the state changes. Even the greatest and mightiest things in nature lose. It is foolish to think I can cling and keep.

A move to NY, the threat of a swine flu pandemic, these were both new circumstances. Is it reasonable to think that under new circumstances I should, I can, keep old behaviors (regardless of the identities I convince myself those behaviors prove in me)? This is just me being guilty of the very trait that annoyed me about those reluctant boarders in the first place. I was exhibiting failure to adapt quickly. But even ending this blog here, internalizing a message of my own failures, my own swiftness to throw stones in glass houses misses a deeper point. Some things in nature adapt quickly. Some things adapt slowly. Neither state can be taken as a point of identity. Neither can be a mark of alana’s specialness, either in awesomeness or in failureness.

I guess I am finally seeing the power of Mae Neecha’s technique…