Waking Up to What You Do (eBook)

Introduction: A Sink Full of Teaching For the years my husband and I worked in our home offices, our meeting place was our kitchen sink. Well, not that we made appointments to meet each other in front of the sink and faucet, but it's where the dishes we individually used throughout the day met. My office was on the second floor and his office was in the basement of our house. The kitchen was in the middle. A good part of a day would pass when the only indication that the other was present in the house was what was left in the kitchen sink after we would each at different times go there to make a cup of tea or coffee or to get a quick bite to eat. One day, I began to notice that every time I went downstairs to the kitchen, another dirty dish or two appeared in the kitchen sink. At first this didn't trouble me. It was just another dish in the sink. But as the day went on, I found that I was counting the number of dishes and separating them into his dishes and my dishes. On one or two visits to the kitchen, I even washed my dishes and let his remain. And with each trip to the kitchen, I added to the dishes in the sink another thought about these dishes. Many thoughts collected about his dishes that he just leaves there expecting me to clean up. What makes him think my time is expendable and his not? Greater and greater the story grew, and without my really knowing it, the sink became filled with far more than the dirty dishes. Then on one occasion, as I was making a cup of coffee, my husband appeared in the kitchen. 'Hi,' he said. Silence. 'Could you make a cup of coffee for me too?' Silence. 'Could you . . .' Cabinet door slams. With an indignant reaction, I indulged my anger and stomped off to my office leaving a bewildered husband standing in the kitchen in front of a sink full of dirty dishes. A sink full of dirty dishes, getting cut off in line at the grocery store, or any other encounter we have from day to day might seem a little too ordinary for a book that talks about Buddhist precepts. But, it is our reactions to these seemingly unimportant situations we face in our daily lives that make up our worldviews and show our true colors. Even a small incident like my experience at the kitchen sink can send us into a tailspin. Within a few seconds, we've gone from a simple encounter to a raging argument. In the heat of the anger, both sides hurl off insulting words and it seems that the sole intention is to hurt one another. In time, things might cool down enough to leave just the reverberations of our angry actions. After the storm, feelings of guilt, sadness, and hurt might surface. Thoughts to never to do it again might arise. Or perhaps along with the outburst arose feelings of strength, self-righteousness. Perhaps the reactive behavior gets blamed on conditions or others. Maybe there's a combination of guilt and blame. Whatever the reverberation, remorse or anger, one reaction has just moved to another and another. After I answered my husband's simple request for a cup of coffee by barging off to the solitude of my office, the thoughts that blamed him began to turn toward myself. 'You're taking my important time from me so that I can wash the dishes you dirtied' became, 'What kind of person am I to think this way? I'm not worth much if I can't even wash the dishes without getting angry or feeling taken advantage of.' You can fill in your own most recent story about something that triggered words or actions that got you worked up. Notice what you did after the dust settled. If you didn't take time to question deeply what was going on with you during the incident, then...