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Right-Mindedness and Red Dresses
Sep. 28th, 2008 09:43 pmWhen I first told my sister I intended to go to my high school reunion, she was silent so long I thought her cell phone had cut off. "Well, there's a sentence I thought I'd never hear from you," she said.
My old friend Jay Young tracked me down on Facebook and urged me to go to the reunion. I hadn't even known it was in the works. At first, I thought I might go just to promote my book, on the theory that even people I hadn't always got on well with might buy it out of morbid curiosity. Then, I started making a mental list of all the people I'd be glad to see again, and the process was a constant revelation to me. Every time I considered it, I thought kind thoughts about more people who hadn't crossed my mind in over a decade.
Last week, my mood started oscillating wildly between excitement about meeting the people my classmates had grown up to be, and blinding animal terror at the possibility of interacting with the few people I feared might not have had it in them to grow up.
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What I wanted was to see them all, without exception, as human beings. Not mythical beauties or monsters or allies, just as people. I wanted to get over myself, particularly the vestigial traces of adolescent self-pity I'd been lugging around all these years. Back then, I was so busy being stuck in my own head, I didn't realize we were all suffering, just not all in the same ways or at the same times. The people I remember as my particular tormentors probably had dozens of targets who felt just as isolated as I did. And the sadists probably learned their sadism the hard way.
I went to search for a little of what the Buddhist monks find when they meditate on Right-Mindedness, on the Eightfold Path. I wanted to study forgiveness. It's a weird world, where the study of forgiveness is catered and requires wearing cocktail attire--I'm still not sure I understand what cocktail attire is--but since the weird world granted me my wish, I'm content.
My old friend Jay Young tracked me down on Facebook and urged me to go to the reunion. I hadn't even known it was in the works. At first, I thought I might go just to promote my book, on the theory that even people I hadn't always got on well with might buy it out of morbid curiosity. Then, I started making a mental list of all the people I'd be glad to see again, and the process was a constant revelation to me. Every time I considered it, I thought kind thoughts about more people who hadn't crossed my mind in over a decade.
Last week, my mood started oscillating wildly between excitement about meeting the people my classmates had grown up to be, and blinding animal terror at the possibility of interacting with the few people I feared might not have had it in them to grow up.
( Read more... )
What I wanted was to see them all, without exception, as human beings. Not mythical beauties or monsters or allies, just as people. I wanted to get over myself, particularly the vestigial traces of adolescent self-pity I'd been lugging around all these years. Back then, I was so busy being stuck in my own head, I didn't realize we were all suffering, just not all in the same ways or at the same times. The people I remember as my particular tormentors probably had dozens of targets who felt just as isolated as I did. And the sadists probably learned their sadism the hard way.
I went to search for a little of what the Buddhist monks find when they meditate on Right-Mindedness, on the Eightfold Path. I wanted to study forgiveness. It's a weird world, where the study of forgiveness is catered and requires wearing cocktail attire--I'm still not sure I understand what cocktail attire is--but since the weird world granted me my wish, I'm content.
