Keep Calm and Observe On

I'm gonna lie on this lily pad until you calm down

Stopping and calming, then looking deeply is a great series of steps to help me solve problems, especially when I feel very excited or irrational. Sometimes when I am stressed out, I am easily excitable and sometimes events that aren’t truly earthshaking send me into a half wild state. For instance, on the day that I had to move out of my dorm, I found that one of my roommates vandalized my room by moving things and making my room even more disorganized than it already was. When I found my room like this, I was furious and I called up my roommate and had a very angry phone call with him and said some things I later took back. After I hung up, I remembered Hanh’s strategy of stopping and calming and tried to recognize, accept, and embrace my feelings before finding insight about them. While I was later ashamed at how I reacted towards my friend, I remembered that the best strategy was to accept how I felt. Of course I would be incensed if someone I trusted threw around my stuff while I was gone and I accepted that it was natural to feel that way. Once I allowed myself to feel this way and I calmed down, I slid back into my excited state when I remembered that I had a flat tire and I was certainly going to be late for work and my boss would be mad at me and this, and that, and the other…

WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?!?!

and then I took another deep breath and calmed down again. This time I sat down and I realize now how that moment to sit down related to Hanh’s metaphor about how animals react when they are hurt: “They find a place to lie down, and they rest completely” (27). So I sat down for five minutes and waited until I came up with a plan. I also took this time to realize that the real reason I was angry with my friend was all of the other stressors on my mind when I called him, but I didn’t realize it at the time. When I figured out what would be best to do, I was able to do it with an uncluttered mind after taking some time to just stop my busy mind, rest, and see the truth behind what I was experiencing. So I called my boss to tell her I would be late for work and she wasn’t mad. I finished packing my car, and then I got down to the tire. I almost started worrying again but I stopped and calmed down again and realized that while I only have a donut to replace the flat, other people in the building surely had a jack and a tire iron. So I asked around and sure enough, everyone had what I needed. I got the carjack from James, the tire iron from Paul, Molly gave me her gloves though I didn’t ask when she saw how cold my hands were, and someone else help me hit off the old tire that seized to the hub.

That day I actually had many insights. The first learned was that the meditation technique of stopping and calming then healing is a great problem solving method. If I didn’t take the five minutes to calm down and see the problems I had as they really were, and not the insurmountable fabrications I imagined them to be, I realized that my problems were entirely solvable.

 I also learned that while I was angry with my friend for making a mess of my room, it was just a room. I felt like it was a violation of my trust, and though I still think it was, I reacted in a volatile way and there was no reason my friend and I couldn’t reconcile, so I took steps to apologize to him for being so upset. A third insight I had was that without other people to help me, I would have been out of luck that day. It helped me realize that I’m not truly alone and that there will always be someone willing to lend me a hand if I ask for it. This is a powerful insight to me because I often feel isolated, but when I look at that feeling closely, I am often wrong and the flat tire helped me see that. And the final thing I learned that day was that acting rationally to solve my problems earns the respect of the people around me, and it proved that “my actions are the ground on which I stand” (124) like Hanh points out. Instead of acting like a crazy person in my panic, I did something about my problems and people gave me credit for trying to fix the flat as opposed to just giving up. The events that day really changed my mind about how meditation helps me problem solve and provide peace to my mind when I am feeling stressed out and uncertain.

             Work Cited

             Hanh, T.N. 1999. The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching.