Ornoth

Back in December, one of the teachers at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center sent me an email, inquiring whether I would be willing to volunteer to periodically read the announcements before their Wednesday evening dhamma talks.

This was ironic and fitting, after something I’d done the month before. During the feedback go-round at the end of the 9-day “Sandwich Retreat”, when I got the mic, I made a joke by reciting the familiar (and grammatically flawed) opening lines of the standard Wednesday night announcements. Since all the teachers had been watching, I suppose it was a manifestation of kamma that they’d soon single me out to “volunteer” to be an announcer when the need came up.

You might ask why I chose to do it, rather than tell them no. Over the past year I’ve really stopped going to the Wednesday night programs, and with my new job a 45-minute train ride from the center, I had a ready excuse.

On the other hand, it’s an easy way for me to give back to a center that has helped me quite significantly. Plus, after 15 years in consulting and 10+ years running DargonZine Summits, facilitating and speaking in front of a group are things I am very comfortable with.

Still, it would give me some interesting material to practice with, from nervousness and perfectionism to vanity and the ego. Plus it would earn me some respect as a leader, both by other practitioners as well as by the teachers. And it would certainly provide food for thought regarding my relationship to myself and the social environment, since I’ve always had a dualistic relationship with receiving attention and praise.

So given that the only material loss I’d face is some “me time”, I think the benefits of doing the announcements are worth pursuing, at least for the time being.

Once I made that decision, it surprised me that the people at the center didn’t schedule a training session for three months, until mid-March. But when they got in touch with me I blocked off a Friday night and left work early to get to Cambridge in time for the orientation session…

… which never happened. The guy who was supposed to train the two of us simply brain-farted and blew us off, not even remembering the meeting until more than an hour later, despite having called the other attendee the day before to ensure she’d show up. This is a person who has also either flaked or simply ignored my previous attempts to volunteer for the center’s tech committee.

I was ripped, but I had the presence of mind to examine the reasons why, rather than simply let my emotions run unchecked. When I tried to map my reaction to the needs, desires, and assumptions underlying it, I came up with several elements.

The two expectations I had of the administrator were competence and consideration. In the former case, I expected him to do something he committed to. In the latter, I expected that he wouldn’t waste my time, since I’d blocked off one of my rare free nights for this training. Of course, I often have to remind myself that I cannot expect other people to have the same zeal for competence and consideration that I do, and this was one of those instances.

However, lest you conclude that my passion for competence is completely positive, I have to admit that not only did my perfectionism cause me to have unmet expectations of someone else, but my high expectations for myself magnified my frustration a whole lot more…

You see, while the training was scheduled for Friday, I was already signed up to do the announcements by myself the following Wednesday. So by blowing off our training, the administrator had triggered my own concern over doing a good job the following week. And I generally don’t take well to anything that comes between me and an audience’s perception of me as a fully competent individual. So underlying my anger was my own anxiety, since his bungling might make me look like a fool a few days later. And that was the real issue.

For the next few days, my mind continually returned to how I was going to respond when I finally saw that administrator, mentally practicing a cutting response to an expected apology. Ironically, our homework for Narayan’s Long-Term Yogis group was exactly that: to observe repeating thoughts and try to let them go. Thanks to that homework, I had the presence of mind to avoid picking those thoughts up and running with them, which was very beneficial.

At the same time, when I did think about it, I realized that it was an opportunity to examine my reaction to being owed an apology by someone. My default reaction to an apology normally is to minimize and dismiss the offense, even though I’d remain angry internally. My usual preference would be to avoid bringing it up at all, to avoid any possible confrontation or unpleasantness. It’s an interesting thing for me to work with, since it’s one of the few situations where I have difficulty being my normally assertive self.

In the end, as I walked into the center for a rescheduled training session on Tuesday (the day before my premiere performance), I decided to throw away all my rehearsed lines and just respond to his apology with whatever response came to me at the moment. That was great, although it still wound up producing my usual self-effacing dismissal of the problem. Oh well!

So running the Wednesday evening talks involves a bit more than just reading the announcements. The announcer is also responsible for audio, which includes the mic for the teacher, as well as hearing-assist devices and their base station. We also record the talks live onto CD, so the recorder must be manned and media capture and levels properly set and monitored. And at the end of the night, one has to set up the room for the following morning’s sit.

So how did my first session go? For the most part, everything went off flawlessly. I only made a couple minor hiccups while getting through the announcements. On one hand, I was a little self-conscious about having to wear my reading glasses in front of the crowd, but on the other hand, it blurred everyone’s faces out when I looked up, so although it looked like I was making proper speaker eye contact, I didn’t have to actually register people’s faces, which made things a bit easier for me!

The biggest challenge I faced was when one of the attendees (a woman I know, actually), laid down in an aisle and closed her eyes while listening to the talk. It wasn’t long before the inevitable happened and she began snoring loud enough to distract the people sitting around her. Since she was (thankfully) right near me, I coughed loudly a couple times to try to keep her from dozing, and a couple times she snorted uncomfortably enough to wake herself. In the end, we were saved by the bell, but next time I’ll be sure to bring my keys, so that I can accidentally “drop” them in such a situation to startle the person into wakefulness!

The night included one final irony… The speaker that night was Winnie Nazarko, and the title of her talk was “Perfectionism”. Kind of appropriate, since perfectionism was the topic of our most recent Kalyana Mitta meeting; it has been the subject of my own recent contemplation of late (something for a future post); and it was the foundation of my desire to do a perfect job on my first night running the Wednesday evening dhamma talks!

So that’s how it went. I’ll probably do 3-4 more Wednesdays between now and September. While I’m pretty comfortable with the idea of running the show on Wednesday nights, I’m still pretty stunned to find myself in the position of being one of the primary public faces of the center. But it’s gratifying that they feel comfortable that I would do a creditable job in that capacity.

Why is it so hard for people to be perfect?

I mean, am I missing something? How hard is it to remember simple things you're supposed to remember? Or actually follow-up on the things you commit to doing? How hard can it be to be aware of your surroundings? Or to have the self-control to respond rationally to life's challenges? Or seek the self-knowledge to avoid being hopelessly fucked up? Don't people learn anything?

All my life, I've aspired to perfection: military precision, and machinelike competence. People who know me think that I have some kind of super-human ability to honor my committments, follow through on what I say I'll do, remember things that most people wouldn't, and provide a completely honest and sincere opinion.

In my days in consulting, I really came into my own, because my employer and peers demanded a preternatural degree of skill, self-control, and presence of mind. I thrived there, having finally found a place where my machinelike precision was appreciated, and where I could actually count on my coworkers to demonstrate the same admirable degree of perfection.

So it surprises me when so many people blatantly parade their humanity where everyone can see it. I look at my friends and I see them suffering for their ignorance, laziness, and inefficiency. And I'm somewhat surprised when they express admiration or surprise when I call up facts that they'd forgotten, or actually do something for them that they forgot they'd asked me to do! Somehow, that has made me "godlike" in their eyes.

Of course, perfection comes at a cost. It does take some degree of effort to actually pay attention to life as it happens. But I find that infinitely more satisfying than stumbling around like one of those toy cars that bounces off one wall before heading off in another random direction. That's hardly the behavior I'd expect from a presumably sentient person, and I have much higher expectations of myself than that.

Of course, one might ask whether all this preoccupation with perfection is a little neurotic. Sure, there's an obsessive component to it, but it's that very obsessiveness that makes it possible for a fallible human to approach perfection. Instead, I'd ask why we should tolerate sloppiness and imperfection and error, when it's so easy to rise above all that and live one's life with honor, dignity, and pride.

It's just not that hard, and it freaks me out that people think integrity and efficiency aren't traits that real humans should strive for.