Clarity for Teachers: Day 31
‘You have no idea how bad the consequences of acting without clarity can be. So always be clear about what you’re doing.’
Well, this is the first of these pieces of advice to show up in the form of a threat. I wouldn’t do that, if I were you. Nice life you got there, shame if something were to… happen to it. My friend, prepare to enter a world of pain.
There’s a genre of wisdom that can outrage a modern sense of justice. A classic case is the Parable of the Talents, the story Jesus tells in which a master goes away and leaves his servants in charge of his wealth: two of them make good investments that return a profit, but the third takes the coin he was given and buries it in the ground to keep it safe. This angers the master on his return, and the story ends with the unpalatable punchline: ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ (Matthew 25:29) It’s a message that seemed to sit comfortably in the mouth of Margaret Thatcher in a speech she gave in a church in the City of London.
When we were little, my sister had a catchphrase. ‘It’s not fair!’ she would yell at the top of her voice, the eternal cry of the younger sibling. My parents would answer, calmly, every time, ‘We never told you that it would be.’
The Jesus who throws the money-changers out of the temple, who slips the trap of a question about taxes with a joke about whose face is on the coin — that guy doesn’t seem a likely source of investment advice. We’re dealing with another kind of wisdom here and it has to do with seeing the world clearly, rather than seeing it as we might wish it to be. A sense of fairness is a great thing, but an expectation of fairness can be dangerous.
You have no idea how bad the consequences can be. Wouldn’t it be fairer if we had an idea — if the consequences were spelt out in advance? That’s how a modern legal code is meant to work; it’s there in the spirit of the framework of human rights, an attempt to build structures based on a sense of fairness. For those of us whose lives are cushioned by the current state of the world, it can seem as though this is how the world works.
I think of a moment in Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s film Babel: the Mexican nanny has taken the young children of her American employers across the border to a wedding, but on the way back things go wrong, so now they are in the desert, trying to evade the US Border Control officers. ‘Why are we hiding, if we didn’t do anything wrong?’ the little boy demands.
There’s a world of pain out there that rarely touches the lives of those of us who have the right passports. But by the time you’re old enough to have noticed the first lines on your face, the chances are that in some corner of your life you’ve tasted consequences — you’ve hurt someone badly enough that it’s painful to think of it, you may live with the knowledge that you have no means to make amends. For most of us, the worst effects we’ve had on the lives of others (or our own, for that matter) did not result from an intention, but from a lack of attention. We weren’t seeing clearly, we’d got caught up in the story that was running in our head, we didn’t want to look too closely at what was going on in that corner of our lives. Something along those lines.
The second or third time I told someone about Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom School, it hit me that I had to take care with the pronunciation — my R’s come out soft at the best of times, and the Awful Wisdom School has a different ring to it. But today I’m thinking Awful Wisdom might be just the name for this genre of things we don’t want to hear. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We never told you it would be fair. You have no idea how bad the consequences of acting without clarity can be.
Västerås, 16 April, 2020
This is the thirty-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.
