2013.03.21 Hate And Zen

For a long time, I've been actively trying to become more zen. "Zen" being a personal code more about The Dude than the Buddha, and leaning primarily on mindfulness and acceptance than meditation. My corruption of the term is one part laziness and nine parts immersion in cheesy cinema, so don't hold me too accountable to dictionary definitions.

One of the original motivations for developing zen was my appreciation for my capacity for hate. From an early age, my dad recognized that I had trouble containing my temper, and we two spent a lot of our father-son time working on managing my temper. When I was six, he hit on the idea of getting me a hammer, and encouraging me to run into the basement to swing that hammer as hard as i could against one of the foundation posts whenever I felt like my temper might get the best of me. I discovered more than catharsis: I found that simply appreciating the degree to which my anger was affecting me was the most important part of controlling it.

All I've done since has really just been a continuation of this. I'm quite proud of how it has developed.

This whole time I've been assuming that I've been vaguely increasing my "capacity for zen", sort of like a buffer with which to keep my sentience from being too adversely affected by anger and sorrow and disappointment and jealousy and the like. To enable me to find an enlightened path, even when I temporarily cannot see past my own bile. It seems reasonable, doesn't it?

Except that I recently had to fill out a simple IT survey at work. Which, according to my self-conceptualization as being adaptable - especially in the realm of basic IT - should have been piece of pragmatic fluff. Give me any kind of tool, and I'll make it work - and I'll enjoy doing it. It has been one of the building blocks of my modest office-monkey success. So when I face-planted in the middle of the survey, utterly at a loss to respond to an open-format question requesting a positive statement about the engineering work tools available, I was kind of confused. Worse: I realized that the instructions had asked for "concise, actionable comments", and I had constructed essays about the degrees to which I was philosophically offended. Then I noticed I was gritting my teeth and snarling, and that my hands were like tense claws, and I thought I could feel a vein bulging by my temple.

So... I very positively commented that "I receive relatively few electric shocks". I edited down my other comments to remove all the various thesaurus results I found for "byzantine". I even removed the bit where I called the mainframe "a system that only Rube Goldberg could like", despite it being both amusing and utterly true.

None of us are as cool as we wish we were. And I have to come to terms with that. Again.