closing the loop

For years I noticed that when I was stopped at a traffic light, people would pull up their cars to fill in the inches or feet to the car in front of them. I didn't, of course. Instead I often felt nice and superior--I'm good at that--because they were being so impatient. What's the point of moving your car? The light hasn't changed. Silly people.

One day recently, I was at a traffic light and my radio had some static. As usual, I moved the car forward a bit to improve the reception (it's possible if you have a nicer car that you've never encountered this problem and solution), and...

Oh.

So while I was making up stories about why people were moving their cars while stopped at a traffic light, I was doing the exact same thing, with a perfectly legitimate reason. I wonder if anyone else was making up a story about what I was doing?

We do this all the time. There's no telling why that woman in the security line was so oblivious to how she was slowing everything down. Maybe she's going to help care for her grown daughter who's dying of cancer. Probably not, but that process, of constantly remembering that we've all got our own stuff going on and it's sometimes pretty heavy, is the essence of compassion. On parallel tracks, we learn to see our own suffering, we learn to see other people as suffering, and eventually we realize (in the sense of "to make real") that the connection goes even beyond "they're just like us."

You never know what's really going on.

commence ass-kicking

Well, sort of. I'm starting to acquire competence at my job, though, and that's always a nice feeling. I'm at my strongest either when dealing with people relationships, or working on broad systems-design questions. As the head of the video encoding team at an online video streaming company, though, we're highly visible and there are always salesguys and customers and partners who would all like to talk to me. It's a little awkward because I don't know much about video encoding, and I haven't spent these past months up to my elbows in the lower-level code.

We're actually getting started on our re-architecture! We did the first tiny chunk last week, and next week, while we'll be a bit slower from ramping up a new team member, we'll start on the heavy lifting. We hired an encoding expert, too, and we're all really excited to have someone on board who really knows video deep-down: it's only been a couple weeks without Abhik, but we're feeling the absence of that expertise.

I think I'm doing well, considering my first management job is for a team:

• with 5 (very smart, very kind) people.
• incredibly visible to customers and the rest of the company.
• completely and conspicuously critical to the company's success.
• specializing in something I know very little about.
• a complete mess in technical and process terms.

All told that actually seems like sort of a silly job to take. I do like doing difficult things, though, and beyond that, it feels like a Right Livelihood thing to do. I feel like I can bring my training and practice to this position where people are actually paying quite a lot of attention to what I say and do. I feel like I can be patient, compassionate, firm, and mostly calm--I've been getting Pretty Excited lately on a few different issues--and that I can meet people where they are and respond directly to their needs. It's the way I try to teach, but that's because that's the way I try to be: I had to adjust to my students in Chile the same way I adjust to very strange people talking to me on the street. We all want to feel heard, and I'm good at listening.

I'll be happy when I've stopped going to meetings and I spend time coding again, but so far, it's been a good choice.

some other points of view

I think I sometimes write and talk about Zen practice in a cavalier, glib sort of way. I know that's shocking, because I never talk about anything else that way. </sarcasm> I do know that at least a couple people in my sangha have found it a bit frustrating or discouraging that I talk about practice as though it were simple or easy: "When I start getting angry, I just notice I'm getting angry, and then I choose how to calmly and carefully respond." I'm not sure that's actually useful to anyone, and every day I learn how to communicate in more meaningful ways. It's hard because it is simple. It is literally simpler than we can imagine, but that doesn't mean it's easy. In fact, I'd argue that being engaged and present, and able to create appropriate and spontaneous responses to events, is the most important thing I do in the world. (More on that later.)

The way I talk about Zen practice has a lot to do with how I started, which is:

1. I discovered Zen when I was 14,
2. didn't do anything but read books until I was 22,
3. failed to develop a meditation practice,
4. drifted away and got more and more unhappy until I was nearly 30, and then
5. BAM! it was time to start practicing, which I did, wholeheartedly and without angst.

I'm not sure it was obvious how unhappy I was before I came to Zen practice, and of course the Zen people only know me from that time on, so I think that without the context of the earlier decades of angst, I sometimes act or sound like I just skipped all the difficult early stages that most people experience.

For some other perspectives, I've added some other Zen blogs in the sidebar there, who all happen to be practicing at San Francisco Zen Center:

• Zen Beginner - Someone in their first year or two of practice.
• compassionate teacher - A third-grade teacher.
• The Ino's Blog - Currently written by Shundo, who has been practicing for many years and is currently the SFZC ino, or head of the meditation hall, responsible for most of the logistics around the temple.

I'm enjoying their writing, and I hope you do too.