Tag Archives: Rejection

RAK at the edge of the shore, or RAK with a side of shame

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I know a woman who, along with her husband, helped me to find the courage to pull back the curtain and expose the man behind who is using the frightening and impressive smoke and mirrors.

I am in Manila, Philippines all this week working on a public health project (I am a behavioral scientist, damn it, not a hippie!). I am sad to be away for Thanksgiving (my favorite holiday) but my daughter and I will celebrate when I get back this weekend, and the work I do here might make a difference…..or not. There is a lot I have been thinking about regarding being away on this holiday, but that is for another blog as I am still sorting that out. There is another topic to ponder for today.

IMG_1651.JPGIMG_1601-0.JPGMy RAK the first day here was to give food to a “street dweller.” Good one, right? Yeah….. but it is more complicated than that. Sigh, isn’t it always? But perhaps a story worth telling and wondering about.

When I drop out of space into a new country the first few hours are a disorienting kaleidoscope of images, sounds and smells (ah, the smells……let’s agree to just skip the descriptions of that part of the experience). I have found that the best way to overcome this overwhelming sensory waterfall is by immersing myself in its waters by walking through busy streets. It also turns out that being out in the sunshine is a good way for me to shake up the circadian rhythm of my brain to help with jet lag. Bonus!

So, after my morning meetings, I headed out toward a park a couple kilometers away from my hotel through the streets with some marvelously intense sensory experience. At the edge of the park, I stumbled across a group of about a dozen hawkers food stalls, closely lined on each side of long picnic tables, under a tin roof, open at each end. Think outdoor food court….with an array of food you would never find in a U.S. shopping mall food court. During mealtimes, these places are crowded, I mean wall-to-wall people crowded, busy, buzzing and it is a challenge to take in and process the whole scene, especially when jet lagged. I walked through, passing the various stalls, trying to absorb the offerings of each stall without lingering too long and garnering the attention of an employee who would then seek to engage me in a negotiation to make a commitment. A tricky process. In the end, I made my choice in part randomly and in part by location because I didn’t think my brain could handle walking all the w
ay back through the buzzing hive without abandoning me and fleeing my skull for a nice quiet spot under the picnic tables. With discretion being the better part of valor, I chose one near the end of the row.

My choice provided me a generous portion of two entrees and rice served in a styrofoam container like what a sub-sandwich might come in with entrees in the container and the rice in the lid. Doing a bit of quick math in my head, this feast cost me about $8 USD…..when my brain was back on line later that day, I realized it only cost me $1.50 USD(!) and that included a soda too.

I sat on a ledge close to the market next to a dental clinic (I don’t know if the proximity of the dental clinic to the hawkers food market was a good or bad thing, or completely random), eating, occasionally chatting with the young men sitting next to me, taking in the sea of people. As I ate, the bustling crowd momentarily parted, revealing a man about 20 ft away, digging through the food court trash can….right there….surrounded by people talking and laughing and quickly eating their lunch before returning to work to whom he appeared to be invisible.

I stood up so I could see over the crowd (turns out that I am sort of a giant in the Philippines) what he was doing. I was saddened, appalled and a bit nauseated to see that he was methodically digging through the trash, opening the discarded styrofoam containers and dumping the contents into a plastic shopping bag.

I immediately stopped eating and started walking toward him. I could see that he had about a gallon of rice and bits of food scrapes in his bag. I was disgusted by how it looked, imagining the effect of the heat and humidity on the contents wrapped in plastic, and, for some reason, the way he kept digging deeper into the trash can to find containers he had not yet opened distressed and upset me. I wanted him to stop. I wanted him to stop now.

As I approached, I opened my container with my fork in it and I offered it to him as one offers a business card in Asia, slight bow and with both hands. In my mind, I was offering food, not trash. He did not break from his task. He took my container, removed the fork, threw the fork into the trash can (points for not littering the fork, nor the emptied containers; all into the trash can), dumped my offering into his bag and continued his search for unopened containers. I was already in the process of turning away but in my head I was thinking, “Wow, I gave you food and you threw it in with the garbage,” which upset me because, coming from my world, I expected him to eat my leftovers…..with the fork I had proved. It was hard for me to understand that in his world my offering meant something different, more to add to his bag.

As I walked away and was thinking about this interaction, I felt a wave of shame. Not because my “special gift” of food had been trashed (literally from my point of view) but because of the interaction in itself. More specifically, shame about my behavior during the interaction. In telling you about my “generosity,” I left out some details, minor details, but they mattered to me. As I approached this man, I averted my gaze, I turned my head away when I handed him the remains of my lunch, i did not make eye contact, I did not even look at him, I did not speak to him, I walked quickly away back into the crowd. And I was ashamed. I recognized a fellow human wrapped in suffering and in need, but I did not acknowledge his humanness.

In many places I have been, I have seen Poverty, sometimes Intense Poverty, Poverty so deeply woven into the fabric of that place that one cannot imagine how it would ever be different. I am no doe-eyed American school boy about the world of humans……well, at least in some contexts anyway. And being present with this man, truly seeing him, acknowledging his personhood was more than I could do. I could not look into the face of this person who was swimming in a massive ocean filled with so many other humans swimming into those same waters while I stood on the shore and tossed in bits of rice. Like feeding koi, standing serenely on the waters edge, safe in the knowledge that I would never swim in those waters. As I walked away into the park, I file this event under “S” for Shame and locked in a filing cabinet for consideration later.IMG_0016-0.JPG

Much to my own surprise, given what I know about my preference for avoidance, a few hours later I did bring it out of the basement and into the sun for consideration. Go, me. I realized that Shame was growing its thorny self on fears and false assumptions about how I “should” act, how the man “should” act. These expectations masked the reality that I had done a random act of kindness. I had seen another human was in need of kindness and responded as best I could, with as much presence as I was capable. That I was overwhelmed by the gulf between my world and his and the intensity of his need, that I could not look him in the face, does not change the fact that I did see him and I acted. And I learned. I felt the rough edge of how far I could go, and I started to question why I could not go further.

I turned this over in my head and in my heart. Why was I unable to accept the situation for what it was and why did I so vehemently want it to stop and go away? Why was I disgusted and rejecting? In a basic way, my offering him my “trash” and wanting it to be “food” was about me, was driven by my not wanting to face the harsh reality of this person’s daily existence, and that of many others in this city. His active demonstration of his intense poverty in the middle of a hive of relative prosperity, while we turned food into trash, we ignored his blatant efforts to turn trash into food. How dare he be a shining beacon of the horror of poverty in action while we were eating lunch. It somehow seemed so much more palatable to walk by beggars on the streets, witness impoverished people mingled with others on the streets thereby being in awareness but hidden enough to not be flashing their Intense Poverty Colors. Ouch. What Ugliness, Ugliness on MY part. How much easier it is to perform random acts of kindness when a Poor Person does not force me to truly step into the horrific reality that is the polluted, neglect stream they swim in.

Crap, crap, crap. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Nothing like having the curtain pulled back and receiving a chance to exam so closely you can see each pore of the illusions you create to keep the world an acceptable level of tolerable. A humbling lesson, a humbling realization about myself and my efforts to fit the world into nicely defined boxes, even when I am trying hard at “being open to experience.” AND despite my personal limitations, my demanding expectations of how I should have been to be a “good person” and to truly be a prize winning RAK-er, and my absurd underlying expectations of the impact my small gesture would have on this man’s experience of the moment, despite how much my actions were driven by my discomfort with the situation, despite all of this, this was also still a random act of kindness. While aspects of my behavior were driven by parts of me that I want to be otherwise and hope to change, it is also true that I saw him and was moved by his suffering to interact with him and show kindness. My shame would need to find another place to root and grow (don’t worry about its welfare as there are many other places with fertile soil in the complex landscape that is me).

Among the many important facets of this event and my subsequent questioning is one that is rare and precious. The acknowledgement that it is not a failure to have times when I am less than what I expect from myself, want from myself. This acknowledgement is itself a random act of kindness to myself. A rare and precious RAK indeed.

Fear of Random Acts of Kindness: Part Two

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Mr. Kitty on the stairs 2014 Lion Statue 10-2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know a young woman who, along with her husband, has inspired me to deepen the process of asking the question “Does it have to be this way?”

Continuing on my last post, thinking about how attempting to perform daily random acts of kindness over an extended period shines a light on those times when I hesitate, or in all honesty walk away even when it is clear someone needs kindness (least anyone starts thinking I am some kind of saint…although I believe we have clearly established that I am “nice,” right?) . This year will reveal many things, both the good and the challenging, which whirl around my brain and through my various guts and innards making it sometime easy and sometimes hard, even impossible, for me to perform RAK.  Some of this goop I know nothing about.  Some of this goop I know quite a bit about, although I will confess that it turns out that even the goop I firmly believe I am keenly aware of and have well under control, turns out to be more goopy than I thought.  Huh, perhaps I should have stated that up front several posts back, sort of a disclaimer: Let’s not make any kind of assumption that at the end of this year, everything is going to be wrapped up in a tidy package.  That would be most awesome though. I wonder if I would get some sort of prizes for being so wise and having used such good thinkology? I will look into that.  In the meantime, I am a gloriously complicated person and that’s all we got to work with.

Back to RAK:  Why is it that sometimes performing simple random acts of kindness can be difficult, make me feel uncomfortable and even require me to push past fear? An important part of the underlying goop, for me, is the fear associated with Ignorance and Want.

The second child that the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals to Scrooge is a girl named Want. Like ignorance, she is “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable” and “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility.”    For me, Want pushes on two painful pressure points: The wants of others/Others and my own wants.

Our strengths and weakness are elements of who we are along the same continuum.  This has been said by like a 100 gazillion people, but I’ll give a nod to Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Our strength grows out of our weaknesses.”) because that seems fancy and intellectual.  I have a history which has shaped me into an empathetic, nurturing, giving, “nice” kind of guy (among my many wonderful qualities).  This “niceness” byproduct of my history oozes out across all areas of my life and is part of my best self, and is the source of a significant challenge for me when it comes to RAK.  Part of the history which hand-crafted this gloriously complicated human involved interacting over many years with some important people in my life who were struggling with their own histories such that they were Bottomless Pits of Want. Their very human and understandable drive to fill that empty wanting place creates an intensely lonely isolation and desperate hunger that interferes with the belonging and connection they fundamentally need. Now picture pouring pitchers of water into a sieve, trying to fill it, and, because you are an empathetic, nurturing, giving, “nice” kind of human, you do this for years, decades.

Too melodramatic? It is hard to find the right balance.  Your patience is appreciated, and your abandonment of this post would be understandable

Why does this matter for what we are talking about?  What does this have to do with RAK? Oh, my bad.  I thought the connection was obvious.  This has to do with RAK because there are some people whose wants and needs are massive, huge icebergs floating through the shipping lanes of our daily lives.  Some are easy to spot (the homeless), others more difficult (pretty much anyone we might encounter).  Of course RAK is not about rescuing people or in any way trying to fill Bottomless Pits, but being fully present often means becoming aware and acknowledging on some level that there are abandoned, neglected, hideous, wolfish children under the Ghost of Christmas Present’s robes.  So, for me, there is both the reminder of sadness of futile attempts to fill a sieve and of the pain that remained for that person with the Bottomless Pit, and the sting that comes from stepping into someone else’s day and sensing the depth of the iceberg below the water line.  I think I am mixing my metaphors, but hopefully you will kindly stack them into neat piles for me.

My own wants?  Yeah……. undoubtedly there are issues here that RAK will continue to raise (Oh, goody! Another valuable growth experience), but this is a start (Thanks, Mr. Dickens!).  Want- abject, frightful, hideous child.  Think about people in your life who are on the Bottomless Pit end of the spectrum.  What descriptors come to mind? Don’t worry, you don’t need to tell anyone what those descriptors are, so please be honest. How about this one; imagine a friend is telling you about someone they think might be a good person for you to date.  They are attractive, smart, funny, nice, have a great job, you share interests, oh, and they are needy (Insert noise of a loud buzzer). Right?  Nobody wants to be with someone needy and nobody wants to be needy, especially if you have had encounters with the child Want.  Being needy, being Want is a fast track to rejection and a one-way ticket to Dumpsville, population me. But 1) everyone has needs and wants, you can’t get around that, and 2) Our culture (notice I switched blame to our culture rather than my history?  Clever move on my part) doesn’t provide good role models for how to appropriately express needs and wants.  I double checked the Owner’s Manual for Being an Adult- nowhere does it define what constitutes being “needy.” How the fuck are we supposed to know if we are being needy or not?  A wise strategy then becomes to hide our wants (under the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present seems a good place), which, as you already know, doesn’t make the needs and wants go away and leads to all kinds of spectacular relationship and human interaction disasters.  Insert feedback loop of crazy and dysfunction.

Let’s not forget that Want has a brother.  Want and Ignorance are a package.  What are we supposed to do?  I don’t have clue of what we supposed to do. Here is an important piece for me to learn from RAK.  This adventure involves being willing to interact with others by being open to the moment, humble and without expectations about my role in their day (and vice versa), and without judgment of whatever comes up inside me pre-, during and post interaction.

Ugh, this really doesn’t capture the depth of what I am trying to convey.  Maybe you could flesh it out in your head and shape it into something that communicates something important?  I would appreciate it. In the meantime I will continue working on finding ways to understand and describe this whole process, this something that RAK is stirring.