Tolerance and Compassion

This morning my mom and dad got into an argument. My mom was telling my dad the “correct” way to use the water heater, and every attempt my dad gave at explaining himself, including a new discovery he made, was talked over by my mom. Eventually my dad just started telling her to shut up. The conversation was over.

I fumed over this. I felt my dad’s rudeness was unjustified, that he shouldn’t have told her to shut up. A few times I walked up to my dad, standing outside his field of vision, contemplating telling him to apologize. All the while I was observing my own body, my own sensations, trying to maintain equanimity.

Eventually I decided not to do it. There’s no point in telling my dad to apologize to my mom in front of my mom, while the tension was still in the air and I was obviously emotional. I let things slide for now, opting to talk man-to-man later if necessary.

After dim sum with grandma, which my dad didn’t attend, Mom and I got back. Dad was asleep, so I woke him up. My fury had subsided, and I playfully woke him up to eat. My mom made a comment about the argument, but the storm had passed.

After dim sum my parents went to my uncle’s place. I didn’t go because I had plans with my cousin Jenny, who had just arrived from NY. I called her, expecting to wake her up, but she was already out and running errands. When I asked when we were hanging out, she conferred with someone she was with, saying, “Raymond wants to hang out.” Some talk occurred, and she told me she was running errands and had to get her hair done. She’ll call me back after. I agreed.

I felt jealous and insignificant. It reminded me of the way we used to hang out in junior high school, when she had a ton of friends and I had to fight for her attention. Despite us having made plans, she was blowing me off to hang out with who-knows.

Again I calmed down, collected myself, and observed the situation objectively. Well, she has someone with her. That’s okay. And she has to run errands. I’ve been in that situation before, having briefly landed in a new place with a ton of things to do and not enough time. We didn’t specify an exact time. I want to sleep anyway, to give my body some rest to recuperate from this cough. So I slept.

I woke up about four or five hours later. Still no call. I ran some of my own errands, reading, meditating. It’s now been over six hours since we talked. I felt that sense of insignificance again. “Perhaps she’s still cutting her hair,” I thought. I called to find out.

She confirmed my suspicion. Well, the optimistic suspicion, anyway. I asked if we were still hanging out. Again, she conferred with the mystery party, saying, “Raymond wants to hang out.” I thought, “She’s making it sound like I am desperate to hang out,” feeding my insecurity. She said let’s have dinner tomorrow night. I checked my schedule, agreed, and we hung up.

This second call was calmer. Despite the second rejection, I knew I had other things to do. Now my time was freed up.

Looking from her perspective, I saw a person who wanted to please everyone. She wanted to hang out, otherwise she wouldn’t have contacted me in the first place. But she was already hanging out with people and had been overbooked. Instead of straight up telling me, she deferred responsibility of the rejection to her unseen friends.

Rather than sensing malice on her part, I now sense struggle. All this compassion training seems to be helping.

In both these cases, I felt my past emotional habits coming up. Yet I handled them in a completely different way. Rather than letting the emotions take over or suppressing them, I observed the way the emotions felt. Given a choice of acting or not, I chose to err on the side of not acting, though it was more a choice of observation than binding. Then, given time, the negative emotions came to pass, and compassion surfaced.

While I was at the meditation retreat, all I wanted to do was meditate every day for the rest of my life. One of the reason I came back to the “real world” was because I needed to apply everything I learned in everyday life. Meditating in a cave every day for the rest of my life would surely be peaceful. The real challenge lay in maintaining grace under fire—coming face-to-face with the difficulties of mainstream life and overcoming them, rather than avoiding.