But we’ll get to all that. Let’s start with the don’ts.
DON’T TAKE PEOPLE’S STUFF
The traditional Buddhist translation of this suggestion is “Don’t take what’s not freely offered.” It’s a bit clunky as a sentence, to be sure. But the clear message here is don’t steal—don’t take money out of your mom’s purse; don’t borrow the dress you know you won’t return; definitely don’t run a giant Ponzi scheme that bankrupts old ladies.
It seems obvious enough, doesn’t it? One of those universal ethical guideposts just about any reasonable school of thought might abide. But, as with a lot of what we talk about in this book, when you start to look closely at your own life, it gets a little dicey.
For instance, for two years in my midtwenties I worked at a retreat center in the Colorado mountains. Long story short: I wasn’t getting along perfectly with the founder. I thought she was a brilliant teacher, so gifted. But she was also my boss. And I was just not cool with her management style. Resentment began to build. And pretty soon I found myself doing something strange. The more annoyed I got with her, the more I started pilfering staples from the kitchen. Now, this was not exactly grand theft auto. But I knew that food wasn’t for me. In fact, every time I swiped a handful of granola or some leftover soup, I felt guilty. But I didn’t stop! I just rehearsed some silly rationalization to myself, stuffed down the guilt, and walked out with another few cups of dried lentils to cook in my cabin. The problem, of course, was that the more I did this, the more shaky I felt. Looking back, I suppose the whole misguided fixation was some attempt to take back a little agency. What I actually did, though, was undermine myself. As the weeks went by, I felt less and less clear, more doubtful, more apprehensive. This little stealing, this knowing that I was not, in fact, upright in my values, blocked my ability to have the real (and difficult) conversations I needed to have with my boss.
Ultimately, stealing, even little-bitty stealing, undermines you. It saps your power. More than that, it reinforces the subtle sense that many of us secretly (and not so secretly) harbor that we don’t have enough. We’re somehow bereft, hungry. We just need that perfect life partner, that new iPhone, that cooler job—and then, finally, then we’ll be happy.
But no. We get the life partner, the new phone, the job, but the craving mind continues. There is always another patch of very green grass over the next rolling green hill. And no matter how many hills we climb, there is always another hill, because if you look closely at your own mind, you knock up against the deeper truth that we, most of us, at least in post-capitalist, urbanized, techno-junky cultures, believe we are not enough.
Which is B.S. Total and complete bullshit.
But how do we start to deconstruct this ubiquitous tidal pull of inadequacy? Simple. We start by seeing the good.
SEE THE GOOD
When I met Craig, he’d been living at his Zen monastery in the remote mountains of southern Colorado for about five years. He had the shaved head, the black robes; he always smelled like fine Japanese incense. I loved a lot of things about him right off the bat—not least that he ran the kitchen and could throw together a meal for twelve by himself in less than an hour (hello? perk of a lifetime). But the thing that really caught my attention was the sign he had posted in his austere monk’s quarters, right on the door so he’d notice it on the way out of his room. See the good, it said.
See the good. How many of us train our eye to see the good? How many of us train our ear to hear the good? And how often, in our daily rush of bad news, bad politics, and bad hair days, does the mind incline itself toward what’s already good?
Let me ask another question: Did you know that most people, most of the time, actually treat each other pretty okay?
Soaked as we all are in the constant onslaught of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, pasting our eyeballs to the next terrible thing that’s happening somewhere in the world, we forget that most people, most of the time, actually treat each other with relative care, with pretty decent okayness. Right now, people are yielding at yield signs. Right now, people are giving up their seats on the bus. Right now, mothers are loving their children. Right now, doctors are taking care of patients and shopkeepers are smiling at customers and people are giving to food banks and somewhere someone is meditating, letting their wholesome states of mind arise and flourish.
But did you know that Americans today think violent crime has risen in the past three decades?
And did you also know that violent crime has actually dropped in the last three decades?
The truth of the matter is that the world is all things—an incredibly complex, nearly hallucinogenic presencing of sights, sounds, thoughts, feelings, impressions, sensations—and our mind, this lightning-quick organizer of energetic influxes, makes sense of all this complexity with a handful of limiting but mostly useful shorthands that reduce it all into meaningful, workable sound bites.
But what if the mind is getting it wrong? More to the point, what if the mind is being duped by clickbait, by ad copy, by the pressurized insistence of a multinational media complex that needs you to look and look and look, and doesn’t care a wit about how you feel about what you look at—as long as you just keep looking? And all this grasping for your attention ties right into a very human foible psychologists call negativity bias.
Have you heard about negativity bias? This is one of those classic psychology terms that, when you understand it and start to live the implications, can really change your life. Here’s the deal:
Negativity bias is the simple but powerful idea that we, as humans, are more likely to see what’s bad than what’s good. Why? Most likely it’s evolution. Evolution doesn’t care whether you’re happy. Evolution just cares whether you pass genes along. And so if you’re living in a jungle with a bunch of attack cats and poisonous snakes, better to be on high alert all the time, and a little stressed out, than relaxed and happy and dead at sixteen.
Maybe all that made sense ten thousand years ago. But these days, with the advent of the information age, our negativity bias is continually enforced. You turn on the TV and there’s a news report of some meaninglessly gruesome murder that happened in a quiet South Carolina town two thousand miles away. And then you go on Facebook and read about how the .01 percent are raking in huge dollars while the rest of us fight for scraps. And then you Netflix a bunch of crime shows and horror flicks and serial dramas where nothing ever resolves. And then you get an email about something going wrong at your job, and a text from your dad saying he’s getting a CAT scan, and a friend sends you the latest apocalyptic account of what global warming might bring. And on and on and on. Which means your negativity bias is being confirmed and confirmed and confirmed and confirmed, until all you see when you look out at the world is people doing bad stuff and the planet going up in flames.
But here’s the thing. As I just said: most people most of the time actually treat each other pretty okay. And though we are in the midst of an ecological crisis that needs to be addressed yesterday (or ten years ago), we can still train the mind to look, right now, in this present moment, at everything that is going right. Not because we are trying to fool ourselves. But because we have already been fooled, and we need to reset the focus and look with fresh eyes at what is already true so that we can build the resilience we’ll need to address all the things that have to get done today, tomorrow, and for all the days after that. This process of resetting our focus, in fact, is how we sustain our energy in the face of the difficulties, setbacks, and betrayals that automatically accompany every worthwhile life endeavor.