A couple of days ago I was “evaluated” by my boss, he is brilliant at what he does…has a very strong mechanical aptitude and a capacity with numbers that quite literally seems like magic to me.
I had not known he was coming, and so when I arrived at the home and he pulled up almost at the same time I had no opportunity to make extra preparations or to gather myself together, or in truth, to attempt to outwit the strong suspicion I harbored that I would not do well in his presence.
And of course, I did not…
There was no blood left on the floor, my gray matter didn’t pour fourth out of my ears, but I experienced a level of nervousness which I can’t recall having that, particular sensation in maybe fifteen years or more.
To say that I tanked, is of course a mild understatement.
I have tried, on the many occasions that he has caught me with a petrifyingly stupid look upon my face, when dealing with the numbers that swim around me like sharks in infested waters, to explain my number problem to him.
I have told him that it is like being illiterate, only with numbers, which seemed to create no understanding for him. I have told him it is like having numerical dyslexia, which also created no lightness in his bewilderment at my ongoing ignorance.
So after such an astonishingly poor performance, I decided to try to shock him into the clarity that he needs to allow me to develop the strategies that can make it possible for me to get through this.
Please understand, that we are talking about a very nice guy, a kind man – but like most people – a man who has little capacity to feel his way beyond the confines of his own skin, his own perspective, his own understanding, his own view of the way he thinks things are or should be. And thus, he cannot seem to come to terms with my total lack of numerical ability.
Spontaneously and somewhat surprisingly, as we discussed my blowout, I decided to tell him why I have no working relationship with numbers…at my advanced age.
I said, “Tom…in an attempt to reframe your view of me, I want to tell you why I am not good with numbers and how I work within my limitation and have developed strategies to cope with, what in many ways is a personal handicap.”
I told him that my childhood had been horrific, a terrifying series of various types of violence that led to a child so needy, so desperate, and so frightened that the very first coping strategy that I developed was to read. I read a book a day, and if they were simple and small sometimes two a day. (Tom is always telling me to tone down my vocabulary, so I thought this might be a good time to get that in as well…asking me to “tone down” my vocabulary would be asking me to do the same rearranging of my basic brain waves that would be necessary to overcome my number problem…it is simply to late in the game to try that.)
He became very quiet, calm, and centered as I spoke to him…I gave no details, save the ones I just described and I went on to tell him that he need have no emotional response to what I had shared as I am entirely beyond the reach of the long shadow of my childhood, and have now moved into gratitude for all that came with me, as I emerged into the world and began my great adventure.
What I did do, however, was attempt to link the number problem to the childhood issues.
“So”, I said, “I started life, as a desperate, needy, wounded, and extremely vulnerable child, and in that condition my pre-algebra teacher, shamed me while I stood at the black board to such a degree that any small manner of numerical skill I might have once had, disappeared on the spot.”
I have spent a lifetime developing strategies to deal with this handicap. These strategies do not include comprehension. I don’t understand the ways and means by which I move around the block in my brain, I only know that I develop a pathway that works, by confirmation of my calculator – which, in this job, I am never without – and I thereby, get it right, most of the time.
I said to him, in ordinary circumstances – (which means not having been unemployed for almost three years) – I would not have taken a job that relies entirely upon math and it’s wicked stepsister, mechanical aptitude. I would have run screaming from the room, pulling my hair out at the roots…rather than place myself in a position of having to work in an enviroment that rests upon my greatest weakness, and a place in which my greatest capacity – visual and spatial creativity – is entirely useless.
I don’t really know how he took this news; he seemed subdued or perhaps shocked by my forthrightness.
I felt no awkwardness in telling him these things, no need to couch it in a certain manner or distribute the information, in a way I thought he would respond favorably to…there was no withholds, and no covering up or over.
A great freedom that…
One of the many benefits in learning that what I “believe”… “know” … “think I understand”… is almost surely entirely false, is that it liberates me from ill-advised attempts to manage the perceptions of others.
“We see the world – (and all things in it) – not as it is but as we are”, I no longer remember who said that…but it is truer than true can be.
Those of us, who feel the most alone, develop strategies that bring harm and chaos, causing others to turn toward us out of pity, sympathy, or outrage. Those of us who feel “white/right must win” are the crusaders for good, who are deeply unaware of, and blind to, the very necessary order that exists just beneath all apparent evil. And then there are those exceedingly rare among us, who learn to live the middle way, defining nothing, judging nothing, arriving nowhere, and being nobody. They step truly and cleanly into the role of Witness, accepting all – never resisting…always moving to the deep center and the wave less depths.
Here in the miasma of dullness that I find myself in, numbers and machines abounding, I find within the capacity to not resist. I abide the feeling of stupidity that washes over me when Tom’s face describes his displeasure, at my weakness. I accept the grasping that bubbles to the surface every single time I see a machine I don’t recognize, don’t understand, and yet am charged with defining what should replace it. I work with diligence, dedication, and discipline to understand what I do not esthetically value, (machines), and am not attracted to, (numbers), for the mere exercise of doing what is right in front of me, what is asking to be interacted with, what is moving toward me, without struggle, without rejection, without regard to the lie that I don’t belong here.
A lifetime ago, I used to believe that I knew what was good for me, what would make me happy, what I deserved…and what I should have.
But now, with wisdom and maturity – in some measure – making itself felt in my life, I come to the realization that my life is, and will always be, measured by my capacity to embrace what lies directly in front of me.
Success turns out not to be a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, but rather the developed, and ever developing, will to stand in the direct middle of the storm and without cringing, turning away, or working toward a brighter future… to stand not with my back to the rainbow, or the imaginary glow of the pot…but rather to discover that the storm, the rainbow, and the illusory pot are a seamless whole, an unbroken line of lush and abundant care, provided by an unseen and unknowable source.
To rise above the desire for “good” is the only true power, to know that “evil” is as necessary as the dawn is the only true liberation. To find in every circumstance the will to deepen, open, and reveal the great and majestic impersonal being, that is the ground of your life and mine, here is our calling and it can come to us dressed up as numbers and machinery, just as surely as in any other form.
I do not, and cannot, know the reason I am surrounded by the numbers I have always dreaded, or the machines I have always been baffled by.
I know only that the resolve that once took me down the long hallway of a nursing home, in search of the sexual deviant that was my uncle, to sit with him…to speak with him…to end his hold over me…the same resolve I used to come to terms with my raging mother, is now in the employ of being willing to surround myself with numbers, machinery, and the mundane.
I smile inwardly at the irony of that…
It seems to my small mind that a woman who has overcome so much, been capable of honoring so much effect, from so much violence, might be more useful in some other role. But that is not where I have been placed, not what has come into my experience, and is apparently not what belongs to me.
It has been a very long road, coming to terms with life. Becoming capable of seeing my world as a moment-by-moment experience, rather than a far away goal for some better tomorrow, which in truth does not and cannot exist.
I believe that acceptance, the end of resistance, the will to tell the What Is truth, and the kindness to serve the smallest measure of reality, with the greatest level of humility, is the front-runner to wisdom. Standing here gazing at the thin edge of a growing horizon of potential, I will myself toward what is True and Real…rather than illusory and fictitious.
I find that along with Allan Watts, author – teacher – committed student, I too am willing to serve not knowing. Watts defined it in this manner… "Atheism in the name of God is an abandonment of all religious beliefs, giving up the attempt to make sense of the world in terms of any fixed idea or intellectual system. It is becoming again as a child and laying oneself open to reality as it is actually and directly felt, experiencing it without trying to categorize, identify or name it."
I left the hellfire and damnation god of my early childhood, and now I find myself leaving the “getting all the goodies” god of the new age movement. I lay myself down, prostrate in front of the Unknown and Unknowable…willing to grow into the Oneself, to return from whence I came, mature, seasoned, open, humble, willing, mute, and respectfully aware of how little it is possible for me to “know”.
I won’t ask you to join me. I am not sure it is a pathway that can be shared, I only know that I must continue traveling…and that the accurate direction takes one more deeply into the limitless interior.
Namaste,
Adayre R. Miller
6/29/11
photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/10351446@N06/3089676384/ and Janice Valise to see more of this artist’s work follow this link
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