Clarity for Teachers: Day 32
‘All the tension you feel comes from being unclear. No one else is to blame.’
‘Who are you arguing with?’ Anna will say to me.
The fingers of my left hand are moving, tracing a little circle in the air, a wheel rolling along. This is a tell: it means I’m off in my head, rehearsing an argument over something that’s got to me. It’s been a while now, but in the first years that we lived together, she’d catch me like this often enough for it to become a joke.
All the tension you feel comes from being unclear. Really, all of it? No one else is to blame. Seriously, don’t I get to blame anyone else, even a little bit?
I think of the old cartoon: the voice off calling, ‘Are you coming to bed?’, and the reply, ‘I can’t, this is important. Someone is wrong on the internet!’
It’s so satisfying to be right — factually, morally, preferably both at once. Doesn’t it feel good having someone to blame? It’s like having a teddy bear, or a comfort blanket.
Do you ever catch yourself staging an argument in your head, protesting your innocence, insisting on your justification? (No? Maybe it’s just me, then…) And the worst thing is, it’s an unspoken accusation you’re protesting against and it’s coming from someone close to you — except that then you catch yourself, and you realise, the accusation is unspoken because it lives in your head, where you’ve put it into the mouth of someone you love, or into the thoughts you imagine them having. You’re arguing with your own sense of guilt, and probably being a nightmare to the other person while you’re at it.
One of the weird gifts of parenthood, I’ve found, is the way it wakes body memories of earliest childhood. When my son was still a baby, I’d feel the waves of anger and indignation when he got upset, the way the wails and the sobs would rise and fall and rise again, and I’d find myself vividly remembering how it was to be four or five years old, I guess, and to get so angry I had to be sent to my room. How the anger and the tears would ebb and then surge again, as I let myself ride another crest of self-righteous indignation, replaying the drama one more time, not quite ready to let it go.
There’s something demonic about drama. It possesses us, and our voices change, our eyes widen, our fingers start tracing invisible patterns in the air. I’m not describing some distant memory of my younger self here, either. This is not about how things were when I was five, or twenty-five. The last time I got properly caught on a wave of drama was last week.
People get hooked on drama, on being right and knowing who’s to blame, and there are days when I’ll take the bait. But I’m lucky these days to have friends and teachers who will help me catch myself before I get carried away, before the tension I’m feeling carries through into actions and consequences, before I take it out on anyone else. They’ll say things along the lines of what it says on this card.
It’s a bitch, this card. It spoils the party, the drama party in my chest, where everyone’s wearing a mask, and under all the masks there’s only me. And at that point, all that’s left to do is laugh — at myself, with my friends, at the joke it took me long enough to get.
Västerås, 17 April, 2020
This is the thirty-second 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.
