Clarity for Teachers: Day 21
‘Hate no one. Cling to no one.’
There’s something naked about these latest pieces of advice. They don’t call up stories that it’s satisfying to tell, or lines of poetry and philosophy. They draw the attention to sore places, raw places where relationship goes wrong.
Hatred and clinging — two ways of holding on.
Hate starts with a feeling that may be entirely appropriate, but then it can harden into an activity, a hobby, a source of comfort: nurturing the sense of being the one who is right, the one who was wronged. Maybe you collect these objects of hate, like a little bag of polished stones, and in quiet moments you take them out and run your fingers over their surfaces. They offer an intensity of feeling that few things can match. Or maybe this intensity possesses you, fuels you, makes you who you are. I’ve seen glimpses of this in myself — enough to have a clue what it might be like to live within the gravity of hate — yet it’s hard to name this without feeling how little grounds for hating I’ve ever been given, compared to the things that were done to some of those I’ve known whose lives seem shaped by its gravity.
Clinging, then. This side of the equation comes closer to home. I know the moment of panic that makes you tighten your hold, the intensity of needing someone that takes the life and lightness out of what you share. Learning to trust, to be still when the panic comes and let it pass, to recognise that what you need comes from deep within you, comes through you, rather than being in the gift of someone else. All of this was there for me in the slow process of growing up and learning to be loving.
I had a friend and teacher in my late twenties, Anthony McCann, who taught me an important lesson. Up to that point, I think I’d treated emotional intensity as the register of authenticity: the stronger the feelings in a situation, the more real and meaningful the experience. Anthony’s observation was that the more intense the emotions are within a situation, the wider the gap will tend to be between the experiences of the people present. I think of it like each of us has a loudspeaker playing in our head, and the louder it gets, the less we are able to hear what those around us are saying. So when the feelings are cranked up to eleven, howling with feedback, we’re barely aware of what is going on for anyone else.
Hate no one. Cling to no one. Don’t hold on. Find a quieter tenderness, a way of being that puts less onto others, that leaves room for listening.
Västerås, 26 March, 2020
This is the twenty-first in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
