Thinking about grudges

Surely entering our third year of pandemic living, we’ll see that a grudge isn’t worth even one of the precious minutes of our lives.

I’m not a big e-reader—I prefer a physical book, mostly because the technology is more reliable—but I do have two and only two books on my phone. These are break-in-case-of-emergency books. They are all by Thich Nhat Hanh.

You may not have heard, but Thich Nhat Hanh died this week, at the age of 95. His passing didn’t make the social media rounds like Betty White or Louie Anderson or, yeah, Meatloaf. These are all lovely people, but that the interwebs tore their hair and wept over those deaths and barely batted an eyelash at the passing of a Zen Buddihist monk, activist, and friend to Martin Luther King, Jr., says a lot about America today and none of it is good.¹

Thich Nhat Hanh was one of the central figures (along with the Dalai Lama) who brought the core ideas of Buddhism and mindfulness to a Western audience. All the meditation apps and books and mindfulness training and workshops and retreats and thought leaders and influencers? They’re all built on the back of this Vietnamese monk.

Thich Nhat Hanh is the reason I have a daily meditation practice and therefore, part of the reason I’m still alive and kicking in 2022, year three of a global pandemic. One of his books that lives on my phone (I have a physical copy—in fact, we probably have three copies of the book in our house—but I like having it on my phone just in case) is Peace Is Every Breath. This was the first book that explained Buddhism and mindfulness to me in a way I could wrap my mind around. Gently. Simply. The book starts with brushing your teeth. Does it get any more relatable than that?

I’ve read Peace Is Every Breath over and over again, because it is like a cool balm and I always need to be reminded of its wisdom. The book is full of poems to use while meditating and as Hanh explains so clearly and lovingly, you really can squeeze meditation into your day in so many places. So start with washing your face and running water in the sink:

Water flows from high mountain sources

Water runs deep in the Earth

Miraculously, water comes to us.

I am filled with gratitude.

There are meditations for preparing breakfast and doing the dishes (the dishes meditation is one of my favorite, as it calls for you to imagine the dishes as the baby Buddha) and driving in your car and answering the phone. This was Hanh’s appeal—helping people figure out how to become more mindful in the middle of a busy modern world. The changes seem small. You don’t have to renounce your house, your spouse, your family, your job. Just live a little more in the present while you’re going about your day. It doesn’t seem like much, but, really, it’s everything.

The other book by Hanh I have on my phone is called, Anger: Wisdom for the Cooling Flame, which reveals a lot about my own struggles. I don’t think there’s anything unique about wrestling with anger in our modern world. It's hard to admit, but there is a satisfaction in being angry and staying angry. There’s something satisfying about holding a grudge. It is righteous. A little exciting. If you love drama, there is so much drama to be had in holding a grudge. It’s not surprising that grudges are right at the core of so much of our literary tradition (hello, Achilles and Captain Ahab and Jay Gatsby).

Because our culture trains us well in anger but not in compassion, it is so much easier to be angry than it is to forgive and let go. It is so much easier to believe you have been wronged than it is to admit that perhaps there are no victims and villains. Perhaps there are only people doing the very best they can and often failing in ways that are hurtful and sad.

For Hanh, anger is an emotion that needs to be taken care of, like a crying baby. This is an expression you’ll hear a lot in our house—“I’m taking care of my anger.” Taking care of my anger means trying not to lash out. As Hanh says, if you came home one day to find your house on fire, the first priority would be to put out the fire and not to find out who started it in the first place. Taking care of your anger is putting out the fire. I am better at this on some days than others.

A lot of our anger (or maybe just mine) comes from the continual disappointment of realizing that the people you love are who they are and not who you want them to be. This is also a great gift, because none of us really want to spend great chunks of our life with someone who’s exactly like us. But this is a gift that’s, admittedly, sometimes hard to see.

One of my favorite poems/meditations from Peace Is Every Breath is about just that, breaking out of the prison of our past and seeing the people we love for who they are. In it, you imagine the person (in this case, a parent) as a five year old child:

Breathing in, I see my parent as a five-year-old child.

Breathing out, I smile to my parent, five years old.

Breathing in, I see my parent, five years old, fragile, vulnerable and wounded.

Breathing out, I look at this wounded child with all my understanding and love.

This is also harder than it seems, but so worthwhile. In the end, all of us are fragile, vulnerable, and wounded five-year-olds, trying to do the very best we can. Failing, and failing, and failing again.

I’m thinking about all this now, yes, because Thich Nhat Hanh died this week. But also because we are approaching the third year of pandemic living. Things are less scary than they were before, but death is present in our lives in a way it wasn’t for many of us in the past.² One practice of Buddhism is to contemplate your own death every life and I confess, I don’t do this very often, but if I did, how would I feel about anger and grudges? If I were to die tomorrow, how good would all that anger and drama feel? How many people are on their death beds think, “I wish I would’ve stayed angrier at that person longer?”

One of the core lessons Thich Nhat Hanh taught me is that the present is all we ever have. Our lives are being stolen from us second by second, minute by minute. The pandemic, too, had the potential to teach us about the fragility of our own lives and to create some space for a more intentional examination of how we want to spend that fragile life. Surely, I remember thinking at one point in the pandemic (A year ago? Two? Hard to say), people will repair the relationships they lost to anger or disappointment or hurt. Surely we know better now. Surely we’ll see that a grudge isn’t worth even one of the precious minutes of our lives.

---

Welcome new subscribers who I guilt-tripped into signing up! You’re awesome.

Lovely, beautiful friends, thank you for reading and liking and sharing and replying and commenting! You’re the reason I keep doing this. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

The last of the winter writing workshops is February 22 and we’ll be writing love, the perfect topic to wrap up this series. Here’s what someone said about the last workshop—writing habits: “Fun people, low stress, and I learned something!” To show the love to the people who’ve been supporting arts in our town (and me) by coming to these classes, I’m including a free, in-person tarot reading for everyone who signs up for this last class. Get your tickets here.

Also, the paperback edition of She/He/They/Me, my award-winning book about gender told as a choose-your-own-adventure, is on its way in June (fingers crossed…publishing is a little chaotic right now). There are lots of new paths to explore in this edition and a new cover and a new subtitle. It’s exciting and I hope to do some giveaways here, so stay tuned.

Thanks also to all my friends who texted me after the Bengals win yesterday! Who Dey! Every now and then, years and years of loyalty to an abysmal, small-market, running-joke-of-the-entire-league, team, pays off. This is that year, friends!

1. Or maybe all it says is that the people who loved and followed Thich Nhat Hanh aren’t on social media because they truly internalized his teachings and are very careful about what they consume, including what they consume from their phones and their computers. I’m working on that. I am.

2. Obviously, like everything in the world now, this is deeply subjective. I think things are less scary. Many others do not. But ceding that point and moving on for the sake of expediency.