Blaming
Perfect day to notice how I blame others. It was pretty comical, really. Something unexpected would happen, there’d be a miscommunication, I’d make a mistake, and zhoop! I’d be blaming the nearest warm body.
But today, having it be my practice period intensification, I was aware of it most of the times I did it. So I noticed that even after I noticed it, and said, Look what you are doing, I kept coming back and trying to blame someone else for the same event, the same thing I’d just caught myself doing minutes ago.
I also noticed that I want to be angry; I think I crave that juicy self-righteous sensation. It distracts me from feelings of unworthiness (as does blame). I think I’m going to make my concentration tomorrow be to notice those feelings of unworthiness. I don’t hold out a lot of hope that I will; I’m too fast on the draw of my gun of distraction.
You know, this picture is scary to me.
Yes, I find SO much power and juice in anger and SO much helplessness and fear when I am able to slow down the quick-draw response.
Last week was forced to marinate in those juices when I got lost on the way to daisan with Ezra. It was getting later and later and I was getting loster and loster. So many thoughts, one of the scariest being that this is the beginning of Alzheimer’s. Not wanting to miss my appointment. Not wanting to appear incompetent, you know the litany. And no one to BLAME! I’d simply been over-confident and not looked up the address. No one involved but me. No distraction to turn to. So what did I do? Manufactured a quick string of culprits. Calm and composed at first, by the time I found myself turning into the same wrong driveway for the SECOND time I felt like Henry Fonda in “On Golden Pond.” (You know, the scene where he goes out to pick strawberries on the trail he’s used hundreds of times before and gets lost coming back.) And that’s when my piranha started trying to attack the OTHER: “Oh why does Diane have to live clear out here anyway. This is really her fault.” Following that brilliant piece of logic, some incoherent charge at Ezra, then at practice in general, and, lastly, the inevitable bashing of myself.
Thing is, with the exception of blaming myself, these vicious piranha feeding frenzies were so self-evidently inaccurate and, well, crazy, that even in my frantic panic I had to giggle at the sheer outlandishness of them.
The deeply ingrained habit of moving to anger, for that moment, broken through. Left alone in the car for the long ride home, without my usual distraction of anger and blame, had to wrestle with that piranha to keep it from having me for an early lunch. And so, forced to practice. To return to my breath again and again. To pull myself out of my self-destructive thoughts a hundred times and back into the present. The only way I know to tame that fish. When I am fortunate enough to remember to do it…