As I began my commute by car to work one morning last week, I made a deliberate decision to pay closer attention to my inner dialogue and the impatience and frustration that often bubbles up when I contend with traffic that’s moving slower than I’d like. I would characterize myself as a zippier and more assertive driver than most, and how I respond to the traffic around me is often my go-to barometer for how I’m doing spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically. In this unexpected spell of intentionality, I — I’m slightly embarrassed to admit — even came up with my own private make-believe (and funny to me but nobody else) campaign called the “NMO (Not Mad Once) Campaign” complete with its own hashtag (#NotMadOnce), in which I challenged myself not to get mad even once during my long commute.
Our wandering minds in these situations can hold a lot of power over us if we let them. They lack intentionality and a purposeful trajectory and are instead at the mercy of the deeply planted cacophony of cultural and social instructions that make up our day-to-day lives. But it’s our wandering minds and the thoughts and our decisions in life that we mistake for our true selves that often get us into the most trouble. These are, or should be, the targets of transformation.
Although I teach and write on the inner transformation of a peacemaker and am well-versed in contemplative theology and acknowledge its profound importance, I’ve been slipping in this department in my day-to-day life lately (I often have the line of the late Robin Williams’ character, Sean Maguire, from the movie, Good Will Hunting, running through in my head in these moments: “I teach this shit, I didn’t say I know how to do it.”). My lower-than-normal attentiveness to my inner life lately may have to do with several life challenges that have distracted me the past number of months, and perhaps the stress applied by these circumstances has temporarily (hopefully) shifted my priorities and compelled me to set aside what I’ve long viewed as indispensable.
Whatever the case, it appears that my deeper self was somehow jolted out of its stupor in a moment of clarity and inspiration to actually try again to follow through with what I teach and therefore normally deem vital. And so as I maneuvered down the freeway that morning last week, I isolated four practical tips for myself to implement in those moments of frustration that can easily breed pride, impatience, anger, intemperance, envy, vengefulness, grudge-holding, violence, and other passions and vices.
These tips can be used while stuck in traffic, sure, but they are really meant to be used in any situation in which our passions and vices are almost effortlessly summoned despite our best intentions, especially conversations on contentious issues that turn into arguments, challenges to convictions that we hold deeply, or any outside attempts to undermine our self-determination. The tips below are therefore really about forging, maintaining, or strengthening relationships with those around us, and this applies as much to the people we don’t know on the road who are encased in steel boxes as it does to our relatives we chat with at family gatherings … and everything in between. As a widespread challenge that many folks face daily, I hope these tips will be helpful to you too.
But before I list and elaborate on them, one caveat: although the following tips may appear to endorse a defeatist, isolationist quietism or indifference in the face of injustice, I am not advocating for apathy in the least. In a culture that seems to think the loudest volume and most animated response equals the greatest concern, most engaged and therefore serious, and highest chance of achieving our goals, the more gentle, meek, and measured responses that tap into the deeper selves of the Other with whom we’re engaging and the better angles of their nature that can change hearts and souls rather than just their behaviour and ideologies often get ridiculed and unfairly neglected. Speaking truth to power and speaking out against injustice has its place and does not exclude the tips listed below. There is certainly a “time and place” for bolder responses, as long as they’re underpinned by a patient and perspicacious coordination of collective resources rather than a rash engagement “in the heat of the moment,” wisdom rather than mere knowledge, and the time and effort to prepare our interior state instead of relying on peurile and unformed knee-jerk reactions.
And with that, the following tips represent the itemization of very specific personal actions I plan to take when I’m in any of the above challenging situations again. I hope you’ll join me too.
- Do not engage the relentless commentary that will inevitably be unleashed in your head. This can take the form of unkind and anger-fuelled thoughts about a driver on the road that kick in whenever your preferred driving pattern is disrupted, or the arguments you scramble to formulate in your head as your interlocutors articulate their views to you on an inflammatory issue. To refuse to engage this commentary in your head is an acknowledgement and awareness that you are not your thoughts. There is a deeper, true self to which we need to pay more deliberate and persistent attention. This self has been suffocated by layers of persona that did not emanate from within, but instead developed in an ad hoc manner through external cultural, social, economic, and political influences that we did not choose to encounter but that have nonetheless created a Heinz 57 false “Franken-self” as an amalgam of these external thoughts, ideas, concepts, ideologies, and sensitivities wrought in the Modern Project to we are all subject whether we like it or not. By deliberately cutting off this commentary in our heads as soon as it starts up, we starve our surface pseudo-self to gradually create the space for our deeper, true self to flourish and prevail.
- Do not try to convince anyone of anything. This is one of the ‘55 Maxims’ that Fr. Thomas Hopko devised (see https://holycrossoca.org/newslet/0907.html for the entire list) and, while counterintuitive, that’s loaded with wisdom. This doesn’t mean that you raise the white flag and give up. If anything, it relieves you of pressure to accomplish something difficult (nearly impossible in most situations) and can give you the space to focus on embodying truth in your inner being reflected in your behaviour in that moment rather than on verbalizing truth as you see it (which are more often only partial truths that are just enough to win an argument). Ultimately, the real purpose of this tip is to help us change our tone, the urgency in our voice, and the anxiety and panic that can overtake our deeper, true selves if our goal is to convince others of the truth rather than simply bear witness to it (which is difficult enough) and let go of the outcome.
- Embrace silence. Again, this also doesn’t mean that you have given up or that you don’t think that your ideas and contributions are of value. Instead, embracing silence is an acknowledgement that vocalizing our rebuttals to a particular stance (for example) doesn’t automatically guarantee success in what you’re trying to achieve (in fact, it almost never does); this is true especially when our interior state is a jumble and vocalizing our rebuttals is more about stroking our own ego than it is about cultivating truth in our fragmented world (especially when we all know deep down that it won’t work). The hard reality is that although we think that vocalizing our views to others increases that chance of a positive result, we rarely entertain the notion that perhaps this behaviour may actually make matters worse, discredit ourselves and our views, and entrench the mistaken views of our interlocutor. It’s our ego — developed by the influence of cultural, social, economic, and political accretions that have external sources other than our deeper, true self and that therefore build up the layers of persona — that’s tricking us into thinking that vocalizing our thoughts on an issue will more likely yield a positive result, and it’s our ego that shields us from the very real possibility that these same words may actually have a negative impact, that is if they don’t do nothing at all. But this silence isn’t just the absence of noise, sound, or the vocalization of your thoughts on a particular issue; this is also a silence as stillness and inner stability — almost a calm resoluteness and self-confidence that doesn’t require the validation of others — and an identification with the inner true self as a mountain that withstands and merely observes, rather than engages, the “weather” that swirls around it (cf. Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land). This silence, then, serves double-duty as relieving the pressure to force a positive outcome with your words and the opportunity to cultivate the stability and resilience of your deeper, true self.
- Use and lean on your prayer word. This is probably the most practical, ready-at-hand tip of the four. I have a few prayer words depending on the context in which I find myself, but I normally simply recite the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” And by attaching our prayer word to our breath, we benefit from the calming, centering properties of an attentiveness to our breathing and can synchronize our prayer with the consistency and reliability of an involuntary physiological rhythm to encourage us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:16–18) (for more on the Jesus Prayer, here a simple practical guide: https://gravitycenter.com/practice/breath-prayer/). But in the context of those situations that test our patience, our prayer word becomes a refuge and escape hatch through which to divert our attention away from the activated commentary in our heads and ego-driven impulse to say something for the primary purpose (whether we know it or not) of avoiding the perception that we were defeated by our conversation partner.
Truth be told, I’m talking more to myself than I am to anyone reading this when I list these tips. I’ve no doubt told them to myself already in one form or another, but the challenge to actually implement them consistently betrays the power of those vices and passions that seek to derail our attentiveness to the inner life by enticing us to shoot our mouths off in an ego-driven attempt to appear right rather than cultivate truth. For those of us who may feel confident in what we say and less so in the extent to which our actions match what we say, may these tips helps us avoid Jesus’ criticism against the Pharisees, “Do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach” (Mt. 23:3).
Excellent.
Thank you for sharing this.
Posted by: Mark Northey | December 28, 2019 at 11:51 PM