Freedom from Injustice

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

Rabindranath Tagore

I’ve been busy shining light in my own soul for the past few weeks, seeing for the first time in two years some hard truths about myself. I know without a doubt now there’s a Higher Power who’s personally interested in my spiritual growth, because the sequence of events these last weeks has inexorably brought me to a gigantic, life-shifting Aha! moment of emancipation, forgiveness, and peace.

My inner darkness began two years ago this month when the FBI burst into my mother’s care facility one morning, arrested the owners for trafficking in slavery, booted out the residents, and destroyed my demented mom’s life. She lost her fragile grip on reality and was dead four months later. I got a major resentment and wrote about it here in April of 2010.

Three weeks ago, the newspaper reported the care home’s owners were sentenced to 18 months in prison and $600,000 restitution to nine workers brought in illegally from a foreign country and treated like slaves. As I read the newspaper report, I suddenly remembered searching for a new home for my mother in the weeks before the FBI raid because the quality of care had deteriorated.

My intuition had told me to move my mother but I didn’t act fast enough. The facility owners and the FBI were beyond my control, but I suddenly saw my part in the fiasco. Recognizing my role in Mom’s meltdown had an immediate effect, releasing me from two years of resentment over the injustice of it all.

That epiphany created a chink in my armor. On its heels came a series of events that brought me face to face with other people whose actions were unjust in the past two years. A little army of people who had hurt me came marching through my life, in circumstances that required me to act helpfully and humanely toward them – something I can’t do when I’m fiercely holding on to resentment about the injuries I suffered.

Because of the chink in my armor, I saw flaws in my own character that were surprisingly similar to those in other people I had judged harshly. I went to my AA sponsor, a woman I’ve met with almost every week for the past year because I wanted her help in learning to live in an unjust world. I told her what I saw in myself. She nodded her head and smiled. She reminded me that we’re all God's children doing the best we can with what we’ve got inside us.

I left her house that night a free woman. My resentments evaporated. I could do the right things now, for the right reasons, with a clean soul.

When I’m willing see my full truth and come clean inside, accepting my part in whatever has injured me, I’m no longer the helpless victim of someone’s wrongdoing. In my experience, all of us lit matches that sent something up in flames. I don’t have to blame anyone anymore. I’m freed from the bondage of resentment through the gift of forgiveness.

I’ve been digesting this as I worked preparing my garden for spring. I’ve pulled out dead stalks, turned the soil, and planted seeds, thinking all the while how wonderful it is to be an imperfect human being. Last night the rain came at last. This morning the ground is soaked, black and beautiful. Fragile first leaves are emerging. Life is good.

Bad Habits Die Hard

Destructive habits fight for survival like hyenas would fight for the last scrap of tendon from the last tough gazelle on the planet.

I’m a deadline junkie. When the countdown hits those final seconds, I go to work: It’s DO or DIE, dearie, so yes I do it, I pull it off, I slide in right under the wire. Watch me crank, every move a ballet, Hail Mary – nothing but net!

The deadline crunch is a way of life, a drug-free adrenaline rush. I write for a living. For 35 years, that copy due-date has ruled my brain. Since my car was rear-ended last November, I’ve been suffering a solid week of misery month after month. All that 11th-hour work, glued to the computer in a deadline frenzy, just kills my injured neck. It turns around and murders ME, and then I have to go prone for two straight days to let my neck recover.

My physical therapist and my AA sponsor have been noodling me to change my way of life. I say, yeah, yeah, I need to do things differently, and then habit takes over, and I’m doing the same old thing, getting the same old results, month after month.

Habits hate change. They’re living creatures who will fight for survival. They live in your brain. They pull strings there, sometimes subtly sabotaging your thoughts (“That can wait till tomorrow…”), and sometimes screaming outright (“NoNoNoNoNO! You can’t do that!”). They’ll try every trick in the book to preserve themselves.

Excessive Misery Is A Good Teacher. That’s scrawled in big orange letters in one of my AA books (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, to be exact, at the end of Step Six, where we address the character flaws that made our lives so adventurous, so thrilling, so disastrous). A short paragraph is highlighted in pink: “in no case does He render us white as snow and keep us that way without our cooperation [blue-ink underline there]. This is something we are supposed to be willing to work toward ourselves.”

Excessive Misery Is A Good Teacher. Sick and tired of being miserable, huh? Maybe…do something different? Change, perhaps? Commit, say, to slaughter a bad habit, even if it bites, scratches and goes down fighting? Whose brain is it, anyway? Who’s in charge here?

So I acted like I was in charge. I knuckled down this past week, made a real effort to be smarter about meeting my writing deadline. Started earlier. Worked shorter hours at the computer. Stayed off the computer entirely if I wasn’t working on a story. Took those breaks everyone was advising I take.

Got the work done a day early! Holy crap! Didn’t have to go to bed for two days! Didn’t get the adrenaline rush, either. Ho-hum. Life threatens to get boring. [That’s a whisper from a dying bad habit…those suckers die hard.] Ah. Maybe I’ll take up bungee-jumping…

It’s easier to eat crow warm while it's warm

I made a mistake in one of my magazine articles last month and I had to write an erratum for the upcoming issue. For fun I looked up quotes on the subject of being wrong:

“When you realize you've made a mistake, make amends immediately. It's easier to eat crow while it's still warm.” This is attributed to a gent named Dan Heist and seems to be the only thing he’s noted for. I couldn’t find anything else about him.

And then there was this from Yogi Berra, who knew whereof he spoke: “We made too many wrong mistakes.”

I especially liked this one from British broadcaster John Peel: “I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.”

My blunder was just sloppy research, not clever, but it got me thinking about a recurring topic in my household: How can two people with opposing viewpoints hold a courteous discussion, supposing one of them thinks the other is mistaken?

After two decades of discussing things with me, my husband, Joe, has a viable answer. In fact, he often is asked by friends if he will perform marriage counseling services for them (he politely declines). “The four most important words in a marriage,” he says, “are ‘Honey, I was wrong.’”

He’s right. I’ve forgiven him countless times. And vice versa. I know his method works because we celebrate 19 years of wedded bliss next week. Ogden Nash put it this way: “To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up.”

Mistakes can be useful in personal relationships. They give us the opportunity to be wrong for a change, which is restful since we all work so hard to be right all the time.

I’ve noticed we’re pretty quick to tell somebody he or she is wrong, especially when it concerns politics, religion, and family matters. This is based on faulty logic, that two people can’t both be right at the same time. It’s the gunslinger in us. “There’s room for only one opinion in this town, and that’s mine.”

In an AA meeting last week, a friend of mine said, “I often mistake my values and judgments for the Truth.” I think we’re all very nervous about ourselves, and we soothe those anxieties by insisting we harbor our beliefs because they are “true” in terms of reality or fact. If our views are right, then views that differ from ours are wrong. We even feel led to convince each other of such verdicts.

We mistake our opinions for facts. We also don’t know how to coexist with divergent perspectives. Even our language reflects this adversarial thinking. People have “opposing viewpoints” and “conflicting opinions.” From the get-go, we’re opponents in a boxing ring. Starting out as adversaries doesn’t bode well for discussions between husband and wife, parent and teenager, or any other duo. Pretty soon everyone will be blaming everyone else for being wrong, and dedicated to proving it.

I think we all need lots of reassurance, and we all find reassurance hard to give. It takes enormous effort to put our defenses on the back burner and encourage the other person. And getting both parties to do it at the same time? It’s a wonder our relationships survive. Many times Joe and I have tried to talk to each other about a prickly thing, each of us trying to choose our words wisely, but then I interpret something he said in the light of my own defensiveness, and immediately I stop being willing to reassure and become devoted to proving him wrong. Many times I have carefully used “I” words but he heard those blaming “You” words, and we wound up in the boxing ring again.

But I’ve learned that if I work at it, I can suspend my commitment to being right just a little bit more. We human beings respond well to loving reassurance that what we feel and think is important. I’ve got to give that reassurance if I want to get it. I’ve got to model it in my own behavior. I’m talking with someone I care about, for Pete’s sake. You’d think it would be easy to remember that affection even when we’re in conflict. But no. I’m too busy mistaking my opinions for facts again.

Joe and I get the best results out of our “discussions” if we give each other plenty of strokes, like admitting I am overreacting, admitting I am overly worried about myself and forgetting to think about him, admitting my flaws and my vulnerable feelings, admitting my love, my ignorance, and my desire to understand. It’s hard work, being loving, isn’t it?

About the photo: Yes, it isn't a crow; it's a blue jay. But it's eyeballing a crow, a warm crow, just out of camera range.

Prickly People Need Love Too

My husband and I have noticed that marriages between strong personalities tend to have moments of prickliness in them, which people survive when they practice forgiveness and tolerance of each other's character defects.

It's harder to practice a good recovery program at home, where we somehow feel free to let it all hang out. It's easier to be a good AA in meetings than it is to be a good member of AA when your partner annoys you.

My husband and I are both strong personalities. He is a self-confessed control freak, and I am often stubborn. We struggled for years to learn how to have mercy with each other, keep our side of the street clean, and grant the other person the right to be wrong.

But he's been sober for 22 years, and I've been sober for 16 out of the past 19. We've grown together. Forgiveness of ourselves and each other has become second nature, except when we have the usual sort of heated words that crop up when somebody's being a butthead. We made a promise to accept each other as the way we are, warts and all.

One day, when it was it his turn to be a butthead, I wrote this poem:

Cactus Love

A work of art the cactus is
a hymn of symmetry
a prick and proud to be

How primal yet complex it is
austere, yet blooms appear
delicate but severe

Compelling is this crown of thorns
it makes you want to touch
but pain results from such

It sounds like you, the cactus does
a fearsome man apart
yet beautiful at heart

Chris Alba (c) 2009