Care
“It’s okay to feel bad, that means you care.” The daytime cook, tattoos all over his face and hands, friendly and reliable, whose face always breaks out in a smile when he sees you even if it’s early in the morning. I’d fucked up in a way I don’t want to talk about here, and he was reassuring me about it. Nothing terrible had ended up happening, but the episode shook me and I was still beating myself up about it the next day. If only I’d been more careful, was the incessant refrain at the back of my mind. Something about that simple reassurance got through to me, though. So I felt bad. That was okay. I felt so bad that I would probably never make this mistake again. Once I thought about it that way, the refrain of regret ceased. I was able to focus on the steps I could take to prevent similar situations in the future.
I generally align with Buddhist teachings, but one of the aspects I always struggled with is their practice of detaching from emotions. You’re supposed to notice the emotion, take a good hard look, and then let it go. The thing is, being torn apart by some intense feeling has led to every major decision in my life. The strength of my emotions is the lodestar that tells me about who I am and what I care about. Fighting for justice is tied to outrage, empathy brings tears, love may be a verb but it’s also a feeling. Guilt and shame and boredom and discomfort are monsters that cling tightly to my back, sometimes, but they have important messages to whisper in my ear. I’m not sure if I want to get better at shaking them off. I don’t want to dismiss too easily that which makes me me.
I think a great deal of wisdom has to do with learning to separate out the harmful from the uncomfortable. When you’re stretching, you lean into a deep stretch and maybe you don’t want to stay there, maybe you really really don’t want to stay there, but if you know your body well enough then you can tell whether you’re hurting yourself or not. Humans are incredibly resilient and it turns out we can put with almost anything. We can drag ourselves to jobs we hate or stay in relationships that diminish us for years or our whole lives. We brush off the suffering and chalk it up to perseverance. That’s not wrong, it does take enormous strength to keep going. It’s just that the entities or people we’re doing all that for might not be the right ones. Our magnificent ability to endure could be put to better use.
I’ve been learning in the kitchen that I can put up with more discomfort than I imagined. Not just exhaustion and pain, but monotony and boredom. For now, it’s worth it to me to work through the discomfort because of the rewards and because I can tell that it’s not harmful to me. There’s a shade of difference between the boredom of this job and the ennui of previous ones, that’s enough for me to make that judgement. Life takes constant calibration, though. What’s good for me now might not be good for me later.
The Buddhists end up being right, of course. The point isn’t to let go of emotions, the point is to not identify completely with every one that threatens to sweep you off your feet. Nothing about the strength of the emotion is diminished. You feel it all, but at the same time you’re able to recognize the feeling as a piece of information that your thinking self can evaluate and decide how to act on. If you care, if you really really care, then you won’t wallow in guilt or anything else for too long. You’ll do what you need to to make the situation better.