How cheaply will you sell your peace today?

I am stuck behind a determinedly slow driver on the road between home and work. Why is she creeping along at 19 in a 35 mph zone? Is she putting on makeup? Texting? Annoyance rises in me and an expletive pushes through my lips. It’s an ugly enough word that it jars me from my trance of irritation and I am suddenly able to recall how a mere hour ago I sat crosslegged on the floor meditating. Was that really me inhaling peace as the rising sun tinted my windows pink and orange? How can that possibly be the same person who sits here now, rigid with impatience, gripping the steering wheel like a weapon or a shield? The next thought to appear is scolding: “You think you’re spiritually evolved? Well, you have work to do, missy!” I breathe my way through this brief, familiar harangue, knowing from experience that the next internal voice will be gentler. And it is. It’s the voice of a kind friend and skillful teacher: “Are you really willing to sell your peace so cheaply and so early in the day?” 

Decades ago, when I first heard that I might actually have some power to create my own happiness, I could not begin to absorb it. As a kid—and well into adulthood—I mostly took for granted that my sense of well being was largely at the mercy of forces beyond me. If it rained, if a teacher expressed disappointment in me, if my mother was late to pick me up from basketball practice, negative thoughts and feelings would be activated. Of course, I was unhappy. How could it be otherwise? By the same token, if I aced an exam, hit a home run, or got a laugh out of my classmates, then, sure, my mood would lift. That how I felt largely depended on what happened outside me I took as an utterly basic fact. Fortunately, at some watershed moment along the way, I was taught to reframe this phenomenon: It was the THOUGHTS I entertained about what was going on outside and within me that most impacted my peace and well being. 

So long as I believed my emotional state was causally dependent on external reality, it made good sense to spend most of my time and energy trying to manipulate and control circumstances. If what was happening “out there” was, directly or indirectly, the source of both my anguish and pleasure, then shouldn’t my mission be to make that “objective” reality match my preferences and expectations? I was, in other words, a pretty normal person, believing that if I could just be smart, savvy, and funny enough, I could make the pieces move in my favor. If I were prepared, clever, vigilant, and strong enough, then, by god, I could create a lasting oasis of internal peace and satisfaction. It was, of course, a recipe for anxiety and sporadic misery since, try as I might, reality coincided with my wishes only sometimes. Further, even when I got what I wanted, the positive feelings did not last. In Buddhist terms, this was dukkha pure and simple, the intrinsic unsatisfactoriness of a mercurial, empirical world that is expected to fulfill a hunger for permanent inner peace. 

I write now as if this were a lesson learned once and for all, but, as evidenced by this morning’s episode behind the slow driver, my process of realizing this teaching has been ongoing. Although it occurs less often and more briefly, it still happens that when certain kinds of circumstances unfold, I am inclined to experience their impact on my internal state as inevitable and automatic. So even though I am a committed meditator with a practiced ability to find space between “I” and “my” thoughts, I am sometimes still capable of reacting so reflexively that it feels like the gap in space/time occupied by my subjectivity has closed. And this matters because it is this node of subjective awareness that I take to be the very seat of my autonomy and agency. How can I possibly respond thoughtfully when it feels like my beliefs and emotions are attached to the end of a chain being yanked around by what’s happening “out there”? 

For me, as for many spiritual seekers, working with reactivity appears to be a lifelong project. Many of us, it seems, have particular areas where the hard won lessons of awareness training seem not to easily apply. Perhaps you have learned to “manage” your annoyance with slow drivers—or maybe they never bothered you in the first place—but a trip to the DMV does you in. Maybe you can deal with the frantic aisles of Costco but lose your shit while waiting for a biopsy report. You may be able to handle the prospect of particular natural disasters, but the promise of global catastrophe has you chronically freaked out. Of course, the kind of reactivity tests we face is shaped by the privilege of our social and material circumstances and it’s partly because of my privilege that I am committed to this path. Because I don’t face the immediate challenges of poor health, homelessness, deportation, or violence, I feel great responsibility to become as skillful as I can be. Indeed, this current moment in history—which I find to be quite difficult—reminds me that consenting to be emotionally tossed about by circumstances is not a luxury I can afford to indulge, not if I want to be truly helpful to the bruised world around me. 

Fortunately, I have gained greater understanding of my ongoing reactivity by reflecting on how I got here. I see, for instance, that, rather than embracing the (for me) experiential truth that conscious awareness ultimately exists independently from the nattering noise of thought, I seem, rather, to have implicitly agreed that, while some internal reactivity is unnecessary and unskillful, sometimes it isn’t just normal but necessary and required. Looking back, I can see that my general inclination had been to use my awareness training  to try to “fix” some of my personality-level issues, say, to become more patient and less stressed. And as spiritually unambitious as that may sound, becoming less irritable and anxious has been glorious. I am proud of this psychological and interpersonal progress. Nonetheless, as my journey has continued, I see that awareness practice has much more to offer and I am deeply curious about what lies around the next bend. 

Perhaps predictably, my explorations return me to the basics. Using tools of self-awareness I have learned from my teachers, and a passion for self-reflection, I return again and again to that most elementary of Buddhist insights: The external world is not the source of one’s suffering. One is not caused to become annoyed, angry or unhappy by circumstances. I am not made to feel irritated by an inattentive, slow, or even a rude driver. Nor am I required to become defensive or offended when challenged by a co-worker in front of others, even if that person aims to diminish me. And when a friend assures me he’ll call but never does, there is no inexorable, primordial force dictating that I must feel resentful toward him. When someone I love does not love me back, there is no internal law dictating that I must be anguished or bitter. When a guy whispers “bitch” at me under his breath at the hardware store, I don’t have to think or feel anything in particular, nor must I retell this as a story to those who later inquire about my day. 

Happily, this applies not only to current circumstances, but also to thoughts about the past and future. When I recall how I was abused as a kid, betrayed by a friend in college, or how someone I loved died because of medical malpractice, I am not obligated to think or feel anything in particular as a result of such memories. Whether my thoughts seem to be generated directly or indirectly by external events, whether I experience them as recollections of the past or as currently unfolding, whether they involve other people or just myself, whether they point to the weather or to a blossoming political crisis, there is no mandate about how I must think and feel about any of it. In short, my subjectivity, the conscious awareness that is me, is not a mere marionette dancing to the tune of whatever thought or perception happens to arise and tug on my strings.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that having feelings is bad, that trauma is not real, or that some feelings are not more “normal” and healthy than others. Relatively speaking, for example, feeling anger about injustice can point to deeper levels of sympathy, empathy, and compassion. And there is surely a reason that we human creatures often find repulsive those who feel joy at another’s misfortune or tragedy. Not only are we cognitive creatures of a very particular variety, we are also distinctively affective beings. Thinking and feeling are obviously a critical part of how we interface with the world, including with other people. Further, many of us have psychological scars and habits that deserve to be skillfully tended and mended. 

But as we focus on such wounds, it can be tempting to overlook how eager we may sometimes be to deny our agency and autonomy altogether when it comes to our most difficult thoughts and emotions and to the actions that we may wish to rationalize on that basis. I, for one, am grateful to the spiritual masters who remind me that it’s possible to maintain some level of mindful sanity regardless of how overwhelming an emotion or circumstance may seem. This is certainly not to suggest that we should all try to emulate such elevated beings. It may be that each of us has their own vocation with respect to how we choose to engage with mundane and existential challenges. But one thing we can all do when the winds of indignation and outrage blow is to keep an ear out for the voice that is curious to know: “How cheaply will you sell your peace today?”

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