One Dollar's Worth of Perspective
I found myself carless last week, and here's an incident from the Friday commute home; the city-bound BART from MacArthur was only going to 24th/Mission (and I needed to go further), so I decided to switch over to the K, and since the earlier on the line, the better (I wanted a seat), I got off at Montgomery. There was an old black man with a battered guitar playing the blues (really there was), and I paused to listen while in line for my MUNI ticket. He caught my eye - he started singing to me. I got out a $1 and went closer; he stopped playing (a graceful fade out) and started talking to me. "I know you, darling," he said. "You come by here." But I don't - I very, very rarely go downtown - and told him so.
"No, I know *you.*" He was insistent. "I see beneath your shell, I know you are a good woman." He was looking at me intensely. "I know...I know how it is, and I see that you know too. You have to have it all, you have to have the good" (and here he pointed to his right eye) "and the bad," (and here he pointed at his left eye.). You know about balance," he pointed at me. "I love you."
Okay, so he was a crazy old man, playing the blues in the BART, but he was interesting, and he told me something I suppose I needed to hear. The good and the bad. Accept it all. Feel, but do not judge those feelings. Judge actions, and keep your right eye and your left eye open. This was especially good advice for what followed...
I'd Be Embarrassed If I Got Embarrassed (Which I Don't)
About 20 minutes later, as I sat on the K, I was reading another book by that funny Jewish author I recently discovered, Rachek Shukert, called "Have You No Shame?" As before, I identified completely with her, even from he very first sentence in which she mentions being about eight years old when she discovered she did not like other children; she's not actively hostile, she just doesn't have anything in common with them, she feels she has nothing to say to them. I think I was about four when I told my mother I never wanted to have children. "Oh honey," Mom said, "Aren't you a little young to decide that? You may change your mind." I never did.
My point is, from the first sentence, I liked this book. It's funny - clever funny, ironic funny, plain funny funny. A little more bowel and vomit references than I prefer but she's writing from real life and I guess that's what you get sometimes. So, I'm reading along, and inwardly, I'm thinking, wow, funny, great stuff. I'm enjoying it, but I'm not, you know, LAUGHING. To laugh out loud at writing you are reading silently alone is really hard. Movies, someone talking, yes, that's way easier to get an actual laugh from.
But then....she was describing a typical family vacation day, by the minute. You know, 8:07am - Dad returns from morning run. 8:15am - Sister whines about runny eggs, etc. The family goes to a science museum and she gets separated. I come to this line: "4:07pm - I have panic attack inside giant model of human heart."
And that was - for whatever reason - the turning point for me. I don't know WHY exactly, but that line made me laugh out loud and it was like it not only released all the funny from the earlier parts of that book, it released all the funny from the last week, the last month, who knows how long. I was helpless. I became absolutely hysterical with laughter. I mean, I could NOT stop laughing. Classic laughing fit: laughs dissolving into barely audible squeaks, sides hurting, my hand covering my face and mouth because I'm sure I was being pretty obnoxious. But what can one do?
Now, this Muni was perfectly silent - some bus rides, people talk and it's loud, some bus rides, everyone is silent in their own world, usually with earbuds. This was a silent, still, stoic crowd - not a single person looked at me with either disdain or sympathy. Not a single contact laugh - I mean, if I saw someone, even a stranger, laughing as hard as I did for as long as I did, I would probably at least SMILE. Come on, people! The Muni was packed and they were ALL - every single one of them, a crowd of humans - intensely and pointedly not reacting at all.
The freaky fact that I was ignored - ignorable, even! - even though I was doing something very bizarre and unusual gave the situation a surreal, almost eerie, feeling to it. Was I the only HUMAN on the bus, in some freaky version of the body snatchers in which the mostly-Asian population of the outbound K had been replaced by humorless aliens? This idea, naturally, only made me laugh harder, which made me wonder how they could keep up the iron-clad indifference as this episode, for all of us, and so it went, on and on.
By great effort, I finally calmed myself down, probably at least 10 minutes later (and that is a long time for a laughing fit), and, weak as a puppy, looked around. Not a single person met my eye. What could I do? I went back to reading and marveled again at the infinite complexities of human social interactions.
The Bus in which I MAY love everyone
Now, earlier in the week, I had - well, not the opposite experience but one that seems related. I was on the 29, the dreaded grumpy and, let's face it, shitty 29. No one really likes the Muni, and some lines are worse that others. The 29 isn't the bottom of the Muni barrel, but it's a sad, forlorn, bummed out bus that rarely sees happy crowds or smiling children. I was bummed too, because I was waiting in the cold for a long time for the damn thing, and tired and miserable from a long commute.
Then a couple of guys got on - just normal guys, probably City College students or working class, one was Hispanic, I think, and one black - and there were no more seats, so they stood in front of me. Fine. That's normal. You have to be close to others on the bus, and we all know it.
But then - and again, I'm not sure why - I started seeing this guy right in front of me. I'm terrible with faces and remembering specifics so I can't tell you what he actually LOOKED like, but I'm seeing HIM, I'm seeing the person and not the body. And while he didn't look like someone I would know - I'm sad to say, I do know mostly people who look like me (white, college-educated, middle-class, etc) and have similar life experiences - he began to look like someone I could love.
Let me back up. Last year, when I was at Harbin Hot Springs for one of those heart-opening workshops, it totally worked and my heart was cranked WIDE open; I had a completely life-transforming experience in which I caught either a pretty good view or at least a glimpse of The Abyss and Illumination. I won't go in to specifics, but one of the things that the workshop leader did was point out, at the beginning, that we were all sitting there looking at each other and thinking, who the fuck are these people and do I really want to be in a heart-opening workshop with them? (He said it in a nicer way, naturally).
"Look around at each other," he said on Friday night. "You're thinking, I don't know these people and chances are I am not going to love them, but I tell you, in 48 hours you will. I know it sounds crazy, but trust me, and remember this moment when you get Sunday afternoon, and you DO love everyone." And he was right - we all went through this amazing experience together, and at the end, I really did love every single one of them. I learned to see and feel and experience who they WERE as human beings, all the way to the bone and heart and past that to where we aren't humans but part of the very stuff of the universe, merely cast in different molds.
And now, on this bus, looking at this guy - and the old Chinese lady next to me, and the fat black man breathing laboriously across from me and the sullen teen next to him - I saw that they were all lovable, and probably loved by someone, and the fact that it just didn't happen to be me didn't mean anything at all. It seemed that even though I was unhappy and cold and surrounded by strangers (they still FELT like strangers I would never know and did not even particularly desire to know), there was something else there beneath my feelings and their feelings and our mutual indifference. There was possibility all around us.
And it didn't have to be brought into reality, either. I wasn't feeling, hey, I could love all these people, I should stand up on the bus and offer free hugs. I didn't think, I should strike up a conversation with the guy standing in front of me. No, it wasn't actionable. All I did was sit there and look at him and everyone else and feel: Ok, I could love you. I know if I knew you, I would love you.
It was liberating, in a way. I don't know if it affected anyone else, but I got off the bus a happier person. I even thought maybe I shouldn't be so hard on the old 29. I don't know its suffering - because its suffering is really just the collective suffering of the riders and drivers who are on it every day. Maybe I was still a little grumpy but at least I got off a bus full of lovable people, and that's something, anyway.
I found myself carless last week, and here's an incident from the Friday commute home; the city-bound BART from MacArthur was only going to 24th/Mission (and I needed to go further), so I decided to switch over to the K, and since the earlier on the line, the better (I wanted a seat), I got off at Montgomery. There was an old black man with a battered guitar playing the blues (really there was), and I paused to listen while in line for my MUNI ticket. He caught my eye - he started singing to me. I got out a $1 and went closer; he stopped playing (a graceful fade out) and started talking to me. "I know you, darling," he said. "You come by here." But I don't - I very, very rarely go downtown - and told him so.
"No, I know *you.*" He was insistent. "I see beneath your shell, I know you are a good woman." He was looking at me intensely. "I know...I know how it is, and I see that you know too. You have to have it all, you have to have the good" (and here he pointed to his right eye) "and the bad," (and here he pointed at his left eye.). You know about balance," he pointed at me. "I love you."
Okay, so he was a crazy old man, playing the blues in the BART, but he was interesting, and he told me something I suppose I needed to hear. The good and the bad. Accept it all. Feel, but do not judge those feelings. Judge actions, and keep your right eye and your left eye open. This was especially good advice for what followed...
I'd Be Embarrassed If I Got Embarrassed (Which I Don't)
About 20 minutes later, as I sat on the K, I was reading another book by that funny Jewish author I recently discovered, Rachek Shukert, called "Have You No Shame?" As before, I identified completely with her, even from he very first sentence in which she mentions being about eight years old when she discovered she did not like other children; she's not actively hostile, she just doesn't have anything in common with them, she feels she has nothing to say to them. I think I was about four when I told my mother I never wanted to have children. "Oh honey," Mom said, "Aren't you a little young to decide that? You may change your mind." I never did.
My point is, from the first sentence, I liked this book. It's funny - clever funny, ironic funny, plain funny funny. A little more bowel and vomit references than I prefer but she's writing from real life and I guess that's what you get sometimes. So, I'm reading along, and inwardly, I'm thinking, wow, funny, great stuff. I'm enjoying it, but I'm not, you know, LAUGHING. To laugh out loud at writing you are reading silently alone is really hard. Movies, someone talking, yes, that's way easier to get an actual laugh from.
But then....she was describing a typical family vacation day, by the minute. You know, 8:07am - Dad returns from morning run. 8:15am - Sister whines about runny eggs, etc. The family goes to a science museum and she gets separated. I come to this line: "4:07pm - I have panic attack inside giant model of human heart."
And that was - for whatever reason - the turning point for me. I don't know WHY exactly, but that line made me laugh out loud and it was like it not only released all the funny from the earlier parts of that book, it released all the funny from the last week, the last month, who knows how long. I was helpless. I became absolutely hysterical with laughter. I mean, I could NOT stop laughing. Classic laughing fit: laughs dissolving into barely audible squeaks, sides hurting, my hand covering my face and mouth because I'm sure I was being pretty obnoxious. But what can one do?
Now, this Muni was perfectly silent - some bus rides, people talk and it's loud, some bus rides, everyone is silent in their own world, usually with earbuds. This was a silent, still, stoic crowd - not a single person looked at me with either disdain or sympathy. Not a single contact laugh - I mean, if I saw someone, even a stranger, laughing as hard as I did for as long as I did, I would probably at least SMILE. Come on, people! The Muni was packed and they were ALL - every single one of them, a crowd of humans - intensely and pointedly not reacting at all.
The freaky fact that I was ignored - ignorable, even! - even though I was doing something very bizarre and unusual gave the situation a surreal, almost eerie, feeling to it. Was I the only HUMAN on the bus, in some freaky version of the body snatchers in which the mostly-Asian population of the outbound K had been replaced by humorless aliens? This idea, naturally, only made me laugh harder, which made me wonder how they could keep up the iron-clad indifference as this episode, for all of us, and so it went, on and on.
By great effort, I finally calmed myself down, probably at least 10 minutes later (and that is a long time for a laughing fit), and, weak as a puppy, looked around. Not a single person met my eye. What could I do? I went back to reading and marveled again at the infinite complexities of human social interactions.
The Bus in which I MAY love everyone
Now, earlier in the week, I had - well, not the opposite experience but one that seems related. I was on the 29, the dreaded grumpy and, let's face it, shitty 29. No one really likes the Muni, and some lines are worse that others. The 29 isn't the bottom of the Muni barrel, but it's a sad, forlorn, bummed out bus that rarely sees happy crowds or smiling children. I was bummed too, because I was waiting in the cold for a long time for the damn thing, and tired and miserable from a long commute.
Then a couple of guys got on - just normal guys, probably City College students or working class, one was Hispanic, I think, and one black - and there were no more seats, so they stood in front of me. Fine. That's normal. You have to be close to others on the bus, and we all know it.
But then - and again, I'm not sure why - I started seeing this guy right in front of me. I'm terrible with faces and remembering specifics so I can't tell you what he actually LOOKED like, but I'm seeing HIM, I'm seeing the person and not the body. And while he didn't look like someone I would know - I'm sad to say, I do know mostly people who look like me (white, college-educated, middle-class, etc) and have similar life experiences - he began to look like someone I could love.
Let me back up. Last year, when I was at Harbin Hot Springs for one of those heart-opening workshops, it totally worked and my heart was cranked WIDE open; I had a completely life-transforming experience in which I caught either a pretty good view or at least a glimpse of The Abyss and Illumination. I won't go in to specifics, but one of the things that the workshop leader did was point out, at the beginning, that we were all sitting there looking at each other and thinking, who the fuck are these people and do I really want to be in a heart-opening workshop with them? (He said it in a nicer way, naturally).
"Look around at each other," he said on Friday night. "You're thinking, I don't know these people and chances are I am not going to love them, but I tell you, in 48 hours you will. I know it sounds crazy, but trust me, and remember this moment when you get Sunday afternoon, and you DO love everyone." And he was right - we all went through this amazing experience together, and at the end, I really did love every single one of them. I learned to see and feel and experience who they WERE as human beings, all the way to the bone and heart and past that to where we aren't humans but part of the very stuff of the universe, merely cast in different molds.
And now, on this bus, looking at this guy - and the old Chinese lady next to me, and the fat black man breathing laboriously across from me and the sullen teen next to him - I saw that they were all lovable, and probably loved by someone, and the fact that it just didn't happen to be me didn't mean anything at all. It seemed that even though I was unhappy and cold and surrounded by strangers (they still FELT like strangers I would never know and did not even particularly desire to know), there was something else there beneath my feelings and their feelings and our mutual indifference. There was possibility all around us.
And it didn't have to be brought into reality, either. I wasn't feeling, hey, I could love all these people, I should stand up on the bus and offer free hugs. I didn't think, I should strike up a conversation with the guy standing in front of me. No, it wasn't actionable. All I did was sit there and look at him and everyone else and feel: Ok, I could love you. I know if I knew you, I would love you.
It was liberating, in a way. I don't know if it affected anyone else, but I got off the bus a happier person. I even thought maybe I shouldn't be so hard on the old 29. I don't know its suffering - because its suffering is really just the collective suffering of the riders and drivers who are on it every day. Maybe I was still a little grumpy but at least I got off a bus full of lovable people, and that's something, anyway.
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