Clarity for Teachers: Day 26

‘Be loving in how you think, speak and act.’

Sometimes the cards have a sense of humour. So this piece of advice turned up just on the morning we were moving house. (Strange to be moving house, when most people I talk to outside of Sweden are barely allowed to leave their houses just now.)

I’m not sure people are meant to move house. To set up house together, yes, or to set off on journeys that start with saying goodbye to the place that was home — and clearly there are whole cultures constructed around elegant rhythms of nomadic movement. But this thing we do, where we cut and paste a burdensome accumulation of possessions from one property to another? Well, the toll it takes is certainly enough to test any idea I might have of myself as being loving in thought, word and deed.

So I carry the card around for a few days without putting anything in writing, as I drive a rental van across the city and lug box after box of books up three flights of stairs. And somewhere in the middle of all this, there comes a memory of my mum, standing in the church kitchen, one Sunday morning in the 1990s. ‘Jesus said, “Love your neighbour as yourself!”’ she’s saying, ‘not “Love your neighbour instead of yourself!”’

I say hello to our new neighbours as we pass on the stairs, though there’s no shaking hands under present circumstances.

One of the stranger schools I’ve had in my life was the company I worked with for a few summers as a student, selling educational books door-to-door. The books were ordinary enough, but the company was more curious: an old-school American outfit, rooted in the kind of ideas about character and the power of ‘positive mental attitude’ that you’ll find in mid-20th century self-help literature. (Ideas which derive, in turn, from the New Thought movement of the 19th century.) Its books were sold solely through college students and its sense of mission seemed so out of time that people used to wonder whether this was a cult or a con.

The money I made from those summers helped me keep up with the lifestyles of my college friends. But this strange summer job was also an initiation of sorts, because the company culture, along with the soft sales and self-management techniques it taught, involved a kind of applied psychology: a recognition of the interplay between attitudes, assumptions, language, attention and human behaviour. No one told us this at the time, but we were paddling in the shallow end of waters that can get properly deep.

One bit of the teaching had to do with ‘self talk’. You could think of this as tuning in to the radio in your head: noticing the stream of verbal consciousness, the things you go around saying to yourself. For a young person studying at a good university, the experience of going out knocking on strangers’ doors to try and sell them things is likely to come as a shock. Some of those strangers are going to talk to you in ways you’re not used to be talked to. Little in the life you’ve had so far has prepared you for the diet of rejection that’s a part of this job — and while you can influence the responses you’re likely to get in a hundred smaller and larger ways, some element of rejection is unavoidable.

You can’t control what other people say to you; you may be able to control what you say to yourself. As you tune in to that voice in your head, there’s a good chance that much of what it says is unkind. We’re often our own harshest critics. You’ll say things to yourself that if anyone else said them to you, you’d want to hit them, or walk away, or do whatever you could to avoid spending time around that person. But you can work at changing the things you say to yourself.

Some of the techniques we were taught to do this felt weird or cheesy: the motivational mantras you’d repeat silently or out loud, or write on Post-It notes and stick on the bathroom mirror. And there’s a bathos in applying all of this to pep yourself up for selling study guides. But the underlying lesson is real enough — and that’s the sense in which those summers selling books belong alongside my year as a street musician in the strange jumble of experiences that drew my attention to what I’ve called ‘the craft of working with human experience’.

And so I come back to my mum’s words among the dishwashing in the church kitchen: fat chance you’ve got of being loving to your neighbour, if you treat yourself with contempt. This is the sense in which ‘charity begins at home’: the starting point for a love that can flow out in how you think, speak and act has to be a kindness towards yourself. (And as I write, I remember Raimon Pannikar’s definition of a person as ‘a knot in a net of relations’, so that the ‘self’ is never prior to, or apart from, but a part of the interwoven fabric of the world.)

I need to be reminded of this, because otherwise the ways in which I fall short of the way of being which this card proposes can easily become a cause for self-recrimination, and that certainly doesn’t lead towards clarity.

Västerås, 7 April, 2020

This is the twenty-sixth 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.