Letting Go

I have this part of me that loves to get away with stuff, and gets really indignant whenever I get caught. I hate getting caught, though not because being caught means I have to admit fault. No, I hate getting caught because it makes me angry, and that kind of angry is totally irrational. I had this kind of episode last night at my daughters swim meet. I was sitting in someone else’s spot and when they asked me to move I got crazy angry. To my credit, I didn’t show it. I moved, and then I sat in my new spot fuming and hating the woman who asked me for her chair back. It is totally crazy. I mean, any given day of the week I would offer my chair and the shirt on my back to some stranger but for some reason on this night I was hell bent on picking a fight.

It was thinking about the idea that I was picking a fight that made me realize that I have been thinking about this situation all wrong for some time. Usually I get angry and do something stupid and hate myself for getting angry. But really, where is the sense in that? That is like offering a child a piece of candy and then smacking them once they take it. No. If I really want to berate myself for anything it should have been for sitting in someone else’s seat in the first place. But of course that thought didn’t enter my head until much, much later.

When I told my wife about it she remarked that the instant had probably triggered something old, some old memory and that I was but an actor on a stage, rehearsing a part I had learned long ago. Thinking about that I tend to agree with her, but couldn’t help but wonder what was the trigger. It wasn’t getting angry, or for that matter probably not even sitting in someone else’s chair, no I suspect that the event that triggered the whole episode probably started further back, possibly when I first entered the building, or in the parking lot, or even on the drive to the event. The subsequent behaviors, the choosing of the seat, and the rage were all just echoes of a much larger drama that was playing itself out somewhere in my subconscious.

I have been thinking about consciousness a lot lately. Mostly because I have been thumbing my way through the Upanishads. If I had to tell you what the Upanishads were to me, I would say they are meditations on the spirituality of consciousness where consciousness it like a spider’s web. You pluck one string and the whole thing is set into motion. Your mind is drawn, like the spider to its prey, and you find yourself in perfect pantomime going through the same old motions.

You know it is thinking like this that really gets me hating my brain. I think about it like some hateful insect but in fact I suspect my mind is actually trying to help me. We go through motions that are painful and distressing, but most likely we are doing this not so much because we are always doing it the same, but because we hold out the hope of someday doing it differently. Someone once told me that insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. I suppose that were true if we never thought about it and just blindly stumbled along the treadmill. But the insanity stops the moment we stop turning a blind eye, and the harder we look at ourselves, the harder it is to do the things that we do without wondering why it is we do them at all, and slowly, little by little we catch ourselves and stop doing them all together. Last night I got horribly angry, but instead of tearing my night apart I gave up my seat, muttered under my breath for a while, and then let it all go.