It’s a Major Award!

I have just received a Major Award! For meritorious service, I have just been awarded The Golden Bedpan! No gold watch for me – an honest-to-god Golden Bedpan! (miniature facsimile.) 24k over pewter. Had I known I would receive this, I’d have retired sooner!

How does it feel to want?

I used to manage a housing project. As part of that job I supervised a maintenance crew, since I couldn’t do everything myself. I would get there early, check the maintenance requests that had come in overnight, balance those with the ongoing maintenance that was due, and any projects we had working. When Tom came in to work, I’d say, “I want you to…” and name a job.

Tom would reply, “How does it feel to want?” On the surface, this was me giving him a job for the day and him giving me shit in return. But what was below the surface? When I asked, this truly was what I wanted. As a human being, he had autonomy and could say no. We could talk about all of the work that needed doing, or something he had noticed the day before. We could have had that conversation first, in which I laid out all the work for the day and we chose together. He also was used to a boss who gave orders, not one who stated wants. Ultimately, he could refuse (whether an order or a want). Ultimately, I could fire him. He wanted the job and I wanted a staff I could count on, so we worked it out each day.

But on another level, he was offering me a spiritual/ontological lesson. I could actually take him up on the offer and feel what it was to want. I wasn’t paying him for that. It was a bonus.

There was someone else I was paying for that. We’ll get into that soon. So what is it to want? One meaning of want is to lack. Another meaning is to desire. If we smash those meanings together, we get desiring what we don’t have.

The Buddha taught that all life is suffering and all suffering arises from desire. Chew on that a bit. A lot of us will chafe at the notion that all life is suffering and insist we are happy. Buddha didn’t demand that we believe him. He demanded that we experience for ourselves. To get that suffering arises from desire might be a little easier but even that might get you thinking about how much pleasure you get from wanting something, planning and saving for it.

We bring a lot of passion to the quest. Passion comes from a Latin word which means “to suffer”. [It’s now a small leap to recognize that compassion means “to suffer with”. That’s a topic for another day.] So you want something. Depending on your personality, maybe you rush out and buy it. Maybe you read Consumer Reports and product reviews. Maybe you go try it out or compare different options. Maybe you save money for a long time, or maybe you just go into debt.

Now you have the thing. Then what? You go onto the next thing to want. My teacher asked us to consider the possibility of wanting exactly what we have. I suggested this to someone recently and they said “You can’t really ‘desire’ what you have though you can desire to maintain it. You CAN be content with it.”

Notice that there isn’t a lot of “juice” in contentment – it’s nothing like wanting, desiring, pining for, coveting. What if my friend is wrong? What if you can want what you have? What if you can bring the same intensity of experience to what is, as you can to what isn’t? Wouldn’t you suffer a whole lot less? Try it some time. (I’ll wait. Let me know how it goes.) Want what you have, not what you lack. See if it’s possible. See how you feel.

We like to complain about what we “have to” do. How would the experience change if we thought of it as what we “want to” do? You might object and say that is lying. But is it? When we make a choice, there is always at least one alternative. Let’s say I told Tom to trim the hedge. He could say he “has to” trim the hedge. He could also say he “wants to” trim the hedge. What is the alternative to trimming the hedge? Obviously, not trimming it. What are the consequences of not trimming it? The hedge doesn’t get trimmed, people get upset because the property looks run down. Someone else trims the hedge and resents Tom for not doing it. I fire Tom and he is out of a job and has no income. There are certainly others. But Tom has chosen to trim the hedge rather than accept the consequences of not doing so. He wants to trim the hedge more than he wants the consequences. How would the experience be different if it started with wanting to trim the hedge?

Mr Natural tries wanting to do the dishes

Top of the World!

Sunday’s ride with the Bombay Bicycle Club included the “Alpe d’ Huez option”. While that is a considerable exaggeration, it did include 3 consecutive climbs over a ridge in the driftless area.

A horse camp for kids at the top of the first climb (PS I was a counselor here 50+ years ago)

My kinda road!

After picking someone up at the airport, I hit the road an hour after the group left, so I didn’t see anyone. The forecast said warm, windy, and cloudy. There was no mention of rain. Twenty miles in, the sky to the north looked ominous. The radar showed it moving southwest to northeast and that it would miss me entirely, just giving some dark sky to watch. The wind was strong out of the south, so that seemed like a safe bet. Thirty-some miles in, it started to rain. There was no cell service, so I had only the sky to go by, not radar or a revised forecast. It was cooling down. With no access to a map, I guessed on a shortcut. It turned out to be more of a detour than a shortcut, only cutting 1.5 miles from the total ride. The good news is that it cut some descents that would be hazardous in the rain. The bad news is that it cut a couple of favorite climbs, substituting straight and flat miles in the valley.

One of the climbs I missed out on Sunday

Blessing of the Bikes

I just had a bizarre epiphany about a traumatic childhood experience. I was waking up from a dream. The dream had ended with a scene of some adult men unloading gear from a car full of boys. One of the men found a backpack and asked mockingly who it belonged to. (I don’t remember the graphics, but it was something deemed unmanly.) I was an adult me standing nearby. He made an off-handed comment wondering if I as a child had been bullied for such things. As I began to answer, one of the boys asked about my current experience and I replied, “Adults are much nicer”, meaning that I no longer feel bullied by peers. In retrospect, that seems ironic, as it was an adult mocking and bullying one of the boys for his perceived femininity.

The dream took me back to one of my childhood experiences of bullying. I ran into three or four of my friends down by the lake, on my way to make collection rounds for my paper route. The guys saw me coming and thought it would be funny to throw me in the lake. They picked me up, carried me to the water’s edge, counted “one…two…three” as they swung me back and forth. On “three”, as they threw, I grabbed one of them tightly. I got one foot wet.

They dispersed and I made my way home, feeling humiliated, and feeling the squish of my waterlogged tennis shoe with each step. Collections would wait for another day. I thought these were my friends, and they had ganged up on me. On the way home, the gravity of the situation built in me. I then began to fear that my parents wouldn’t take my experience seriously. I took off my glasses and broke a temple piece, where it had previously (not that day) cracked. Now they’d take me seriously! These kids broke my glasses!

I got home and told my story. Because of the glasses I was taken seriously – mostly because of the expense (minimal, in retrospect) of fixing them. My father demanded to know who these bullies were. I wouldn’t tell. He didn’t push very hard. I think he admired my unwillingness to rat the kids out.

Until this morning I experienced this as bullying. I rejected the “boys will be boys” argument. I woke up this morning with a different experience. Was I bullied for being me? Or was it a spur of the moment thing? Had one of those four been the one walking along, would they have done the same to him? (One might ask, “would that make it better?”) Under other circumstances, would I have found it funny? 

At any rate, this morning I realized that “bullying” may not be an objective thing; that it may be in the eye of the beholder. It was clearly my experience that afternoon. I felt betrayed. People I thought were my friends no longer felt like my friends.

I felt powerless, but was that “their fault”? What was so terrifying? I was not afraid of the water. I lived on and in the water. They weren’t trying to hurt me (nor did they); they were goofing around. (Does the concept of “goofing around” include the experience of the victim? Did they consider whether it would be “fun” for him?) What made that moment an experience of terror? Was it because I felt powerless in my family and, at that moment, the one place that felt safe felt safe no longer? How were they to know?

The today me (I hesitate to say “grownup me”, as it just changed today, at age 66) feels very differently than the 12 year old me (or even the yesterday me). It feels much more complex today. When I felt betrayed by friends, I turned to family for support – the very family in which I felt powerless and unseen; and which was the source of much bullying.

Now that is bullying.

It seems to come back to the obvious(?) If we are going to label, we label the behavior, not the person. Were those boys “bullies”? I don’t think so. Was their behavior “bullying”? Yes, though it did not start that way. It was a “boys will be boys” moment until I reacted in terror and they did not stop. Was my terror about them, or about me? What might have happened had I named names and those boys been called out? Would they have been branded as bullies? Would my dramatization of the incident been brought out? Would I be victim or liar? Could I be both? Is our world big enough to accept both of those truths and deal with them?

Today’s ride

I woke up this morning and checked the weather – thunderstorms blowing in around 10 and sticking around through mid-afternoon. The ride to Vermont Church for the Blessing of the Bikes looked unlikely. I wrote the post above, did a few loads of laundry, and prepared to settle in for a day at home. I checked the weather again and there was a big red blotch on the forecast map, blooming from the little green area moving up from Illinois. I did some other stuff but couldn’t resist checking the map one more time before it was too late – the big red blotch was now a bunch of scattered spots – scattered showers and thundershowers…what the hell, let’s go!

Vermont Church (in better weather)

I headed to the starting point, thinking I was nearly ½ hour early – plenty of time to chat with the other riders and think about what we’d do about the weather. Surprise! surprise! The start time was ½ hour earlier than the website said. They were just heading out of town. I told them I’d catch up. The next surprise was that the road out of town was closed. They took a shortcut so I didn’t catch them until about 8 miles out.

We ran into scattered showers – chilly enough that I was glad I had shoe covers and a rain jacket on, warm enough that I was glad the rainpants were in the jacket pocket. We shortened the route to get to the pancakes faster. The folks of Vermont Valley Lutheran Church were waiting with a spread that included pancakes with choices: maple syrup, blueberry, strawberry, or rhubarb sauce – I guess someone out there has a sunnier rhubarb patch than mine. They had sausages for those of the meat persuasion, as well as OJ and church basement coffee. After we ate, the minister blessed our bikes. It was no hurried blessing – he blessed our gears for crisp shifting, our tires for smooth rolling with no flats, and our brakes for quick stopping, too. He asked for some sunshine, which arrived after about 15 miles.

After the blessing we retreated to the basement, as the worst of the weather was just arriving. We waited out the thunderstorm and I was glad to have rainpants for the trip home. At the edge of town, the sun appeared as a tailwind blew us home.

Church

One of the people I rode with this morning said that, at his work, they block his late afternoon schedule on Wednesdays and label it “church”. Today is Sunday, the day when many of the Christian persuasion go to church.

Three loads of laundry started the day, followed by 60 miles of church. We rode up Vermont Church Road which leads, of course, to Vermont Lutheran Church, home of the annual Bike Breakfast and Blessing of the Bikes. This year it will be Sunday, May 20. The church is, fittingly, at the top of a hill.

Church was not confined to this building. Today is one of those days when people say, “You couldn’t have asked for a nicer day!” I thought about what I would ask for. I couldn’t come up with anything.

I saw more motorcycles than bikes on the road. For that matter, I didn’t see any bikes going my way for about 25 miles.

I ended up in the fast group through no fault of my own. As you well know, I’m only half-fast. The first climb separated us and the guy next to me said, “I think that’s the end of the pack.” The four of us rode together for the next 30-some miles. There was a route option that we hadn’t discussed. We were on the “long route” and there was an “Alpe d’Huez Option” with two more big climbs. I was at the front of the group on a descent and took the easy way out. When next I looked back, no one had followed. I passed two other riders in the next mile and then saw no one until two of the original group caught me coming back into town. I was thankful for the company (and the lead-out through unfamiliar suburban territory).

The willows are in bloom. The countryside was filled with that glorious color we call “spring green” (to be confused with the town of the same name), the delicate yellow-green of blossoms that will give way to the fuller-bodied green of leaves.

Church wasn’t over yet. On the radio on the way home I heard Alison Krauss singing “Down in the River to Pray” on WVMO (You can listen on-line, as it is a low-power station that reaches the west side of town on a good day.)

Church was still in session with “Sunday Afternoon Live at the Chazen“, a live stream on the first Sunday of the month. If you keep reading, this won’t be the last you’ll hear of this program. I’ll be encouraging you to tune in August 5, 12:30 PM CDT. I’ll be in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Where will you be?

Today featured the Pro Arte Quartet. (A quartet founded in Belgium in 1911, they found themselves stranded in Madison, WI, USA when WWII broke out in Europe. They were offered an artist-in-residence position at the University of Wisconsin and they’re still here.) For the second half of the program they were joined by the Hunt Quartet (a graduate student quartet) for Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat minor. The standing ovation was well-deservedto my ears.

I suppose it would be stretching the metaphor to consider my post-ride beer with lunch at Monty’s Blue Plate Diner to be a sacrament. Monty’s is in a former gas station (run by a childhood neighbor’s dad and uncle as Havey Brothers Texaco) and is the first place my son entered upon moving to Madison. (I can’t say “set foot in”, as he was 3½ months old and didn’t walk in.) We had lunch there on the way home from the airport, so he hadn’t yet seen his new home. When he was two he asked for a job there, it being his favorite restaurant. The waiter promised him an application. He expressed his displeasure when we arrived home and he hadn’t received his application. He showed them by becoming a musician instead of a fast-food waiter. (One might argue they are not mutually exclusive.)

The ice cream at the walk-up ice cream stand after lunch likewise was probably not

Image from The Capital Times

sacramental, but the tulip was. And the bike sculpture is a final image from the walk home. Now to fold and put away that laundry from this morning and iron my shirts.