A part of me was hesitant to press the publish button on that last blog post I wrote about one of my characters, because the experience of writing it reminded me of certain cringe-worthy moments of yesteryear, when I would bring my stuffed animals to school for show and tell at the age of five. In the end, I pressed the publish button anyway. The very fact that it is like being back in kindergarten again is precisely the point. It’s all part of the effort to tear down the house that ego built. To unlearn what you have learned, as a certain little green man would put it…
With all the chaos going on in the world today, it’s imperative to have something in your life which facilitates the renewal of your beginner’s mind. I’ve seen up close what happens when you don’t have that something. For twelve years, I worked for a woman who devoted her life to trying to kill her inner child. The quintessential example of a Type-A personality, to put it mildly. In the world according to her, any personal habit, activity or ritual which even remotely resembled a hobby or a daily zazen practice was a complete waste of time, and if it was a waste of your time, then by extension it was automatically a waste of hers.
Granted, she was a leading expert in the field of critical infrastructure. I’ll give her that. She was very good at what she did; I wouldn’t have chosen to work with her for as long as I did if she wasn’t. But in the sixty-two years the Fates allotted her on this earth, she learned absolutely nothing about introspection. She was repulsed by the very concept of introspection; it was her garlic. So pathological was that repulsion that any attempt on anyone’s part to school her anything about introspection was met with unbridled hostility. Anyone at all. I once overheard her, at fifty-four years of age, telling her own mother to “shut the fuck up”.
Tearing down the house that ego built was simply not part of her DNA. She was more the type of person who would move into that house as opposed to tearing it down. Not only that, but she would go the whole hog festooning it with priceless works of art, a marble jacuzzi, a wide moat inhabited by ravenous salties and piranhas, and a resident butler whose legal status within the the country was sketchy and could be threatened with deportation if the lady of the manor was at all unsatisfied with his work. Sometime while she was in the midst of angrily barking orders into a megaphone at the contractors who were given the thankless task of building that house, she turned into this…
This should almost go without saying, but she was never the author of any book. In spite of multiple former colleagues suggesting that she ought to pen and publish her memoirs, she could never be arsed with any of that. It was waste of her precious time. She was too busy ruling the world. Not to mention writing such a tome would involve all that icky introspection stuff on her part. Bleck! Pewey! She didn’t even write her own social media posts, because she was way too good for that. That was something she could hire people to do for her.
Five and ¾ Senses 