Humility

“Take a happy pill, Heather,” said my daughter’s violin teacher. “You’re just going to have to do the work it takes to learn this – you might as well be happy about it. Settle down and do it with humility and attention.” – Something like that.

I was struck by the wisdom of his words, and the fact that humility is, indeed, a crucial component for learning anything. It gives me the willingness to go ahead and work at something even if it’s hard, instead of making excuses for why I don’t know it already. I look back these days on huge swaths of my life in which I didn’t make the effort to learn something that I wanted to and could have. I see that arrogance was a large cause of my inactivity. I felt I should already know something, given my great education and/or experience, so I didn’t want to put myself in the group of those who didn’t know in order to actually learn it. This has been true at different times about my writing, my music, illustration, web design, and probably other things I could have been good at.

Thinking deeper, wondering how I could have not seen this arrogance at all, I realize that it was tied in with my sense of self-worth. My self-worth rested on my concept of myself as a smart, well-educated person. The way I had it set up, to be a person who still needed to learn all those things was in conflict with what made me worthy of existence. I apparently was willing to accept huge blindnesses in order to preserve the illusion (delusion?) that I knew as much as I needed to know to be the person I thought I needed to be.

Going deeper still, I see that I could have, and still can, place my sense of self-worth on something more elemental than an image of myself as a certain kind of person. I can place it on my source, and my place in the universe - on my identity as a child of God. This view of myself maintains my worthiness no matter what, and allows me to admit to ignorance, and to missteps, and to my need to learn and grow.

Isn’t it funny that having my self-worth be placed on a much greater thing would allow me to be more humble? Isn’t it interesting that arrogance is a mark of a deep need to find the elemental source of self-worth that isn’t dependent on a cardboard cut-out self-image?

I got an award two weeks ago. It was for showing up. It was because two years ago I stumbled across an organization that struck me as so good that I needed to give something of myself to it. It’s a self-organizing advocacy and support group for homeless women. I remember thinking about the fact that I didn’t have anything in particular to offer them, but that I could be, perhaps, a body – answering the phone or doing whatever humble labor might help them. It turned out that they set me up to work with a writing group, which spluttered along weakly under my unconfident leadership, such that I felt lucky they were allowing me to be there. This evolved, for a time, into my helping with the production of a bi-weekly newsletter. I felt mostly like a weak catalyst prompting them to keep putting in the energy it took to do it.

Eventually my comfort and confidence evolved, and the writing group started to get stronger. This coincided with my clarity that my best role was to do the very least – to impose no expertise, offer very little advice, and basically encourage them to listen to themselves. So I continued to feel that my role was a very humble one. That’s why I was astonished, at the 13th annual Homeless Women’s Forum, to be this year’s recipient of their “Woman of Light” award, for a woman who, while not homeless, does much to help their cause.

It was an amazing feeling to get the reward. There was the kind of embarrassed astonishment, and the awed sense of the great work the organizers and attendees were doing, and the gratitude for being allowed to work with them.

Later, I found myself thinking about the paradox of humility. Jesus talked about how we have to humble ourselves to be exalted. But being humble doesn’t turn out to be a wretched state, and being arrogant feels anxious, not confident. The strongest basis for humility is having an unassailable understanding of true worth. And humility is the grounding that allows things to be accomplished.

Grace

A friend and I started getting together about a year ago for coffee or lunch, to talk about matters of Spirit and of the heart. When the food arrived, the first time, I lifted up my fork as usual to begin to eat. But before the food reached my mouth, he said, “grace.”

It wasn’t like he was admonishing me, telling me we should say grace first. The word itself, the way he said it, was grace. It made me stop the automatic movement of restaurant habits, made all my trajectories disengage, spin like gears on a coasting bicycle. I felt myself lifted – my thought floating into a much larger place. Grace. He continued, “It’s right here. It’s all that ever matters.” From that point I was ready for all our interactions to be grace-filled – to exude what matters.

At several Thanksgivings over the past years, I’ve felt the momentum of all the food steamroll over the thanks. We were a group of friends together, each family bringing something, doing the last preparations together in our kitchen. When it was ready, there seemed to be the need to eat it while it was hot. But later I missed the taking time – or whatever it takes – to disengage from the trajectory of motion and float, still, in grace. Last two Thanksgivings I had us spend a moment before eating to express thanks. It almost worked. I still needed to find a way to invoke that sudden peace that came with Peter’s “grace.”

So this Thanksgiving, before all the food was set out, I had everyone gather in a circle. I told them that I wanted to do a grace, and that others could have the opportunity to share their expressions. Then, when we were all holding hands, I said, “Grace. It’s right here. It’s all that really matters. It’s the joy that’s in everything that’s joyful, the thing that makes anything you’re doing feel worthwhile.” In that moment, for me, the grace came present. It stayed as other people shared thanks, and one friend shared a movement exercise. It continued throughout the time of food and conversation and movement and music, till the end of the evening.

Trajectories

Last week I spent a lot of time scraping glue off a plywood subfloor. I had taken off the linoleum first, and when I was pulling it off I thought the swirly patterns on it might be the grain of the plywood. But on closer inspection, I found that they were swirls from the combed application of glue before the floor went down. They left bumps on the subfloor which, when scraped off, revealed the actual patterns of the plywood.

The scraping-off process was laborious, so that after a session of it I would still see the activity when I closed my eyes – feel the rubbing of the scraper against the glue until it would suddenly slice through, and the persistent scraping that would eventually lead to the smooth gliding of the scraper over the clean plywood surface. And I found a parallel to this image in something I was thinking about.

All the swirly glue lines are like the trajectories I often assume comprise my life – the pattern of me driving on the freeway to go downtown, the start and finish of a task, the arc of mortal life from birth to death. I may think they show the character of my being, but they are not the true grain. I reach the true grain by ceasing to direct my attention along the lines of the trajectories, to get still and look (or scrape) down and under to find out what I really am.

There is much energy, and much money, directed to selling the notion that these trajectories constitute life. Most recently I’ve become aware of the vast propaganda machine that hits people at 50, saying, time to fall apart – you’re on the downward slide now. It took me a few weeks of being pulled under by it before I stood up and said no. I recognized that this trajectory, like all the others, was just another bumpy application of glue that needed to be scraped off the subfloor. I did step back and look at the scope of the lie: just as people are thinking they’re free from the ropes of careers and family raising, they’re asked to take on a new burden of self-absorption – that of imminent physical and mental decline. As I looked at the story, it basically said the same thing throughout its arc from birth to death: you’re not at the right time for happiness, fullness, maturity, and blessing. First you’re too young, then you’re too burdened, then you’re too old. So when I rose up in rebellion to it, I rebelled against the whole arc – not just the decline being sold to me now, but also the awkwardness being sold to me for my adolescent children, and the sense of the burden of careers, and the basic bumpy lie that good is somehow delayed or missed, instead of being the signature quality of every moment.

The true grain of being says, good is here now. This moment is a blessing. You have always been exactly good, exactly right, and you are now. There is no importance in the direction or placement of any of the trajectories of mortal life. The deep value of each of us has nothing to do with what trajectory we are on or where we are in the arc of that trajectory. It has everything to do with our constant relationship with the Mind that thinks us up, fresh, moment by moment.