Earlier this summer a friend came visiting and brought with him two women, a couple of his acquaintance. I did the usual host-y stuff, showed them around the house, made tea, assembled a plate of cookies, indulged in small-talk, exchanged work and life info. My kitty cat April decided to join us in the living room as well, making up quite the cozy little group of folks chatting their way through an afternoon.
But one of the women—an urban lumberjack, by the way, close-cropped hair, dressed in a man’s suit with a string tie, weighing a good three hundred pounds—suddenly growled out in her faux-drill-sargeant contralto-cum-basso: “You aren’t taking proper care of your cat!!” I guess this had been bothering her throughout the visit and she just couldn’t hold it in any longer. Naturally I was a taken by surprise, not only by the suddenness of her outburst but also by the subject of her disapproval. I could reply only something along the lines of “I beg your pardon?” She repeated herself and amplified. “You aren’t taking proper care of your cat! Look at her! She’s just skin and bones. She didn’t have a dish of dried food in the kitchen! She just creeps around and doesn’t have any spring to her step. When she was sitting on the floor, her head was drooping like she was about to fall down. You had to reach down and help her onto the couch! You aren’t taking proper care of her!”
These are the moments when a decade plus of Dharma practice can come in handy, just in a practical everyday way. One response might have been to blow up in outrage over her unconscionable lack of manners, her nearly unbelievable rudeness, order her out of the house, etc. But practice clicked in and a reminder about karuna (compassion) tempered by upekkha (equanimity). I concluded that her heart was in the right place, even if she was talking through her hat and behaving badly. So I kept my calm and pointed out gently that April is well over 24 years old, 100+ years in people terms. She has grown thin with age, like those spry old women who have gradually dried out to a barely-covered skeleton. She doesn’t have dried food because her teeth aren’t up to the challenge of eating it; she can eat only canned food, and the paté-type stuff at that. She has kitty arthritis and I think some kitty osteoporosis as well. Her head does droop sometimes when she sits, much the way little old ladies’s heads seem to creep down lower and lower on their necks as their upper spine curves. She can jump on the couch by herself all right, but she really prefers me to pick her up if I’m handy. In short, she’s made it to extreme old age, with my loving care and some fairly substantial medical expenses. She is disease-free, flea-free, clean as a whistle. Proper care? People should be so lucky.
I got a grumbled sorry from my ill-mannered guest and that was the end of that. In more ways than one: later, I made it clear to my friend that he was never to bring that obnoxious woman to my home ever again.
Another related, but different, story comes from a session in which I played a Haydn sonata for a group of piano students during a teacher’s repertory class. Normally I wouldn’t do that for all the tea in China—I hate being asked stupid questions by naïve and narrow-minded piano majors—but in this case I owed the teacher a favor. So I played the sonata, one of Haydn’s most lyrical and least virtuosic.
One particular student chose to diss my performance with the flat statement: “Haydn is supposed to be light and charming. Your performance wasn’t light and charming.”
As I said, naïve and narrow-minded. With that I mounted my soapbox. I pointed out that Haydn’s compositional career began around 1749 and ended around 1804. That’s a good 55 years. In that time, he wrote about 107 symphonies, 70-ish string quartets, 60-ish piano trios, over a dozen operas, about 15 masses, 60 some-odd piano sonatas, literally hundreds of divertimenti for various chamber groups, secular and sacred cantatas, three or four oratorios (depending on how you classify Applausus), lieder, incidental theatrical music, glees and catches for chorus, folk song settings, even the Austrian national anthem. Those works run the gamut of mood and emotion, from soup to nuts. This vastly experienced composer, master of all genres known to his era, supreme craftsman of musical form and unparalleled virtuoso of 18th-century orchestration.
But according to you, I went on tartly, this magnificent composer’s entire life achievement can be summed up in just three words: light and charming. How very insightful of you.
The rush to judgment. We all do it. We make up our minds about something on the spur of the moment, and then everything else that happens runs through our pre-assembled filter. We live to fault-find so when a guest in a stranger’s house we begin making mental lists of what we think is wrong and should be corrected. We mistake the few trivial sound-bytes we have picked up from piano teachers for actual appreciation or knowledge of a composer’s output.
Speaking without thinking, pigeonholing information and ideas and people on the basis of nothing and then treating those pigeonholes as though they are indisputable facts of the universe. Drivel masquerading as nonsense is called “natural law”, spouted confidently with the cocksure arrogance of the utterly ignorant.
But we can’t research everything deeply. We can’t get to know everything broadly. There are only so many hours in the day and so many days in the course of our lives.
Nevertheless we can try. At least we can strive to remain aware that our knowledge is always shallow, that what we know is but a grain of sand compared to what it is possible to know. True, such an attitude taken to extremes would leave us paralyzed, incapable of action and hamstrung by indecision. But mindfulness practiced assiduously may well keep us away from extremes, from that hardening of the mind that comes from continually pressing our thoughts against the farthest wall.
And we must be mindful about the middle way becoming the “no” way — i.e., the wishy-washy touchy-feely liberal stance that cannot see the obvious even when it is staring us right in the face. That’s also a mindless state. Some things are just plain wrong, some things are just plain obvious. Some things are just plain right.
Thomas Paine called it “Common Sense”. Maybe it is a lot less common than he thought, and some people’s common sense makes very little sense. But it’s a start. And once in a while—such as the words of a certain federal judge in California the other day—mindful thinking actually makes itself heard.