I have been noticing my relationship with one of the teachers at the zen center. This is the best way that I can describe it:
I... am drowning.
I am in the ocean being thrown this way and that by large waves that toss me to one side or the other and make it difficult for me to surface and breathe. I manage to push my arms down enough to get my head above the waves and then wave my hands in the air to get the attention of this teacher. I shout to him, "Help me, help me! I'm drowning!"
The teacher (who is standing on the deck of a large ocean liner which is completely stable and could never possibly tip over) looks out at the ocean where I am drowning. His eyes come to rest on my flailing figure, and he appears to recognize that, in fact, I am drowning.
"Hmmmh," he says, as he nods in recognition to me. Then he leans back, and seems to give his attention to the other people who are on the boat with him (I'm not sure who they are, perhaps they are other students).
"Let me tell you a little bit about drowning," he begins. And then he does. He tells them about drowning, about the concept of drowning, about what drowning feels like, he might even share about his own experience with drowning. But basically, he just keeps talking.
Meanwhile, I am drowning. I am in the ocean that he is now standing upon in his comfy ocean liner, but I...am drowning. And part of me, is really mad. Because part of me feels like he's the one who told me to go swimming, he's the one who suggested that the water might be fine, he's the one that was doing the backstroke and making it look like it was all heated and calm. And so part of me feels like it's really unfair of him to just talk about drowning while I'm the one actually drowning. Because I feel like I'm doing my part by actually jumping in and trying to swim but he's totally failing me by just standing there, and talking about drowning.
So I give up on him.
"F this!" I say and swim as far away as I can in the absolute opposite direction of him and his boat.
But then I stop, because I am tired, and I find myself, in the middle of the ocean, not exactly drowning, but not exactly getting anywhere either. Bascially, I am treading water- within sight of the ocean liner but it's pretty far off in the distance.
And then his stupid "talking" about drowning shows up in my head. I hear it, and it makes me angry, because it isn't picking me up out of the water and delivering me safe on to the deck of the ocean liner. But still, his words are there, in my head, and so I listen to them, mostly because they are there and I am in the ocean, still drowning.
And then I begrudgingly try them. I don't know exactly how I try someone's words or someone's talking but I do something related to what he was saying, and I find myself swimming. I'm not doing the backstroke, I'm not gliding powerfully and gracefully through the choppy waves of the coean, but I am moving of my own accord rather than being dragged down by the force of the ocean.
And I am still angry. I might even be angrier than before because his stupid words are what I listened to and appear to be what buoyed me to the point at which I was floating enough in the water to start to take some strokes of my own.
And so I swim, angrily, back toward the ocean liner. Eventually, I arrive, about ten feet away from the deck, and stay there, treading water, while the teacher continues his talk. At one point, he stops. His back is to me at that point as he is addressing the other people on the boat, but he turns his head sideways, so that he can see me from the corner of his eye.
"Oh," he says as he looks at me. "I see you figured that out," and then he goes back to talking to the people on the boat. I don't think he's talking about drowning anymore. I think that talk was just for me and probably ended a while ago. I also think that, though his back was turned to me by the time I got there, his gaze had been on me the entire time while he was talking about drowning, up until the part that I began to swim on my own. Honestly, I don't really know.
What I do know is that I am still in the water. I also know that I am still mad at him.
I also know that there are people on the boat who have, in the past, as soon as they saw me drowning, jumped into their life boat, rowed out to save me, wrapped me in a warm blanket, and lovingly let me sip hot chocolate as they did the hard work of rowing us back to the safety of the boat.
What I don't know is whether I could survive in the water if the only response to my drowning were talking about drowning.
I know for sure that if I were only saved by life boats and offered hot chocolate, I wouldn't ever bother jumping into the cold water again.
For now I know that I am still in the water. And I know that I chose to swim toward the teacher, not away. And I see myself, treading water, but keeping my head up enough so that I can hear what this teacher is saying.
No comments:
Post a Comment