When I was a youngster, starting out in the world of work, one of my fledgling tasks was to take a piece of paper into an office where a bear of a man would put a stamp on it. This quaintly old fashioned act of bureaucratic officialdom would then release some widgets into my possession. My widgets were always needed urgently. So were everyone else’s. But I never got my widgets right away. There was always a problem. I had the wrong piece of paper, it was the wrong signature, it was the wrong phase of the moon. The rules changed every time. The guy was playing with me. I always had to come back, time and time again to stand before the bear-man and his rubber stamp, then go away with my tail between my legs to explain, humiliated, to my boss that the man would not give me my widgets.
I hated him. He was terribly overweight, stank of cigarettes, his hands were stained a sickly yellow. His skin was sallow, his teeth black. He was ugly, and he had a bad temper. He was a heart attack waiting to happen, and forgive me but I hoped it would happen soon. And he thought I was a useless greenhorn kid of seventeen, unsure of himself, easily fobbed off, and to be fair, I thought this about myself as well, and hated myself for it, while he probably thought he was pretty cool.
Our relationship was never going to be an easy one. Getting widgets out of him was a nightmare, but it had to be done. Our mutual problem was that we were both living unconsciously. I thought he was an inferior human being, and he thought the same way about me, which made me feel pretty worthless about myself as well. None of this was spoken of course – it was more an awareness that passed at a subliminal level – communicated through the halting tone in my voice, in my body language, even in the sweat on my brow, while his self possessed superiority came at me in long unsettling waves, pulsing from his obnoxious bulk.
Later on though, I came to see him differently. I’m not sure how, and it was a gradual thing – not a revelation or anything – but eventually, I found a way of looking closer, of raising the level of my consciousness. And he became a man like any other, a mother’s son, perhaps even a father to children of his own. He would laugh, I suppose – though I never saw him so much as smile – but we all laugh at things, don’t we? He was probably bored with his job – all he did was sit in this grey, sour smelling office and stamp bits of paper all day. It must have driven him mad. It must have made him say to himself every night when he put on his coat and turned off the light to go home: there must be more to my life than this?
I won’t go so far as to say I found a way of actually liking him, but I did come to respect the humanness in him, respect his right to breathe the same air as me, and I tried to see more in him than my own ego had previously permitted.
As for my opinion of myself – equally important – I decided I was okay too. I wasn’t a genius, nor a demi-god or anything – I was just this human-being, like him, both of us making our way as best we could. Together we had a job to do. I had to deliver the piece of paper, get him to stamp it, then I could get my widgets. This was how we met and interacted in the world-machine. I’m sure his opinion of me didn’t change very much and he remained entirely unconscious of my being, as well as largely delusional about his own, but my new found confidence in myself, and my egoless respect for his right to simply be did bring about an unexpected change and, crucially, an easing in the anxiety I had always felt in my dealings with him. Instead of sitting, staring at me with glassy, bloodshot eyes and pointing out the bureaucratic shortcomings on my little piece of paper, he would grunt, then reach for his rubber stamp.
And I would get my widgets right away.
Why are you sure that he remained entirely unconscious of your being and largely delusional about his own? Just when you knew him, or later?
I am groping out of that state even now. How prevalent do you think it is?
Hello Clare
That’s a good point and thinking about it, you’ve caught me out in a moment of exsitential elitism there. How did I know he was unconscious? What makes me think I was alone being able to raise my psychological game? Sounds elitist to me, now, and I’m suitably chastised. My only excuse is that I was still young at the time. But thank you.
I say he was was unconscious of my being mainly because of the way he was with me – there seemed to be no compassion in him, no lightness of being, just a heaviness sucking the energy right out of me – but you never know what’s going on inside someone’s head, what they’re struggling with, or what their inner-most aspirations are.
I think at the time the shift in my own conscious outlook was enough to ease the stress I felt when dealing with him, but nothing more. I never went looking for him in the mean time. For us to have really got on, I would have needed to feel a definite shift in him. I think that’s how friendships and loving relationships have their genesis – you both feel something on an inner level, a mutual respect, a connection, and it just works.
Great blog, Clare – just subscribed. We seem to have a lot of interests in common.Good to meet you.
Regards
Michael
Thank you, I am delighted.
I have done a post on this, scheduled for 31 March: what does the spiritual path mean for living well, how many are on it, how well do we see each other? More questions than answers.
[…] The Rivendale Review. I find the story inspiring and illuminating, but how many of us, do you think, are like that? […]
Hi Clare,
I think for most of us, it’s an aspiration, a good thing to aim for. But it’s like a balanced diet – we know it’s right, and we know we feel better when we’re doing it, but we’re all human and sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing.I’m sure there are people tuned into this kind of thinking all the time, and when you find one they’re worth listening to because they’re the most compassionate among us.
Regards
Michael