Today as I was driving, someone honked their car horn at me. I had been in the wrong; I had started into an intersection that I thought was a four-way stop but wasn’t. I hadn’t actually gone into the intersection, but he blew his horn to let me know that I was about to. It wasn’t being honked at that bothered me, it was that afterwards as the man was passed in front of me he made a face and made some irritated hand gesture at me. Somewhat belatedly, and long after the fact, I flipped the bird at him, honked my own horn, and called him a name that I can’t repeat in this blog. It wasn’t that he had honked at me that had angered me, it was his rudeness afterwards that implied that I was trying to get away with something or in some way needed to be told something or taught some kind of lesson. As the immediate anger cooled, tears filled my eyes, and I began to wonder what was up with me.
Perhaps part of what was coming up for me springs from a deep sadness about what I consider to be a manifestation of man’s inhumanity to man, or in this case man’s incivility to man. I often ask myself the Rodney King question: “Can we all just get along?” And I get discouraged. I try to be kind, to do the right things, to display compassion and to direct loving kindness toward my fellow humans. And yet, I continue to witness or experience directly basic incivility and lack of compassion on the part of the human beings around me. It’s enough to make me want to withdraw into my “cave” of safety and not engage the world. I can understand to a certain extent why some monks cloister themselves away from humanity and work inwardly with in the cloistered community to create a space where civility and compassion and love and kindness are the order of the day rather than some exceptions to the ways that we behave and the ways in which we interact with one another.
I must confess to that, as a person of color, and one who carries a number of marginalized identities, I experience that incivility at a deeper and much more profound level. At its most extreme, it manifests itself in name calling and hate crimes directed toward anyone who is different. I myself have not been the victim of overtly racist, sexist, and heterosexist hate crimes, but I have often experienced the “thousand little cuts” that affects my everyday existence as a person of color. That is, I’ve been on the receiving end of any number of different kinds of slights and mistreatments that affect me in and color my experience of daily life.
I’m not sure I can say at this moment what any of this has to do with gratitude. I suppose that having a grateful heart and expressing gratitude is the way in which I approach my life on a regular basis, and therefore it helps inform the way that I walk through the world. I would suggest that opening my heart to gratitude, compassion, generosity, and other attributes of which I’ve recently been much more mindful can’t help but inform the way that I live my life, and experience and respond to the incivility and the microaggressions that come at me on a regular basis.
Here is where this all circles back around to my original anecdote about having been honked at by the man this morning: incivility, microaggressions, all the ways in which we as human beings have learned to be cruel and mean to one another infiltrate into our cells and exude from our pores. We internalize the messages that we receive from people who tell us that we are not good enough, that we are somehow less than and therefore not worthy of civility and respect, and at the bottom fundamental level, of love. My response to the man who honked at me was to apologize as if I had intentionally done something wrong to him, had made some kind of mistake and was therefore fundamentally a bad person. As ridiculous as it seems, that’s how I interpreted it in that moment.
Of late, I have become keenly aware of the harsh, mean voice in which I address myself for even the simplest of mistakes. The other day I was driving home, having left the office much later than I had intended so that would get home before dark. There was some work I wanted to do in my yard that required me to be able to see. Because I was unable to leave the office early as I’d hoped and found myself stuck in the usual gridlock of rush hour traffic, I cursed and swore at myself and called myself all kinds of terrible names for my “stupidity in leaving the office so late and therefore arriving too late to do what it was I had wanted to do. In the back of my mind I heard the harshness of my voice and the meanness of my words and thought I couldn’t seem to stop myself, I made note of it as something I needed to pay attention to and begin to change.
Tonight I am grateful for multiple realizations: first and foremost is the truth that I am worthy of the love, respect, and well treatment of my fellow human beings. I deserve better than to bear the brunt of peoples’ basic lack of civility and kindness; we all do. I am grateful for the realization that I have internalized many of the negative words, harsh voices, and hurtful actions that people have directed toward me because I am different and that I turn those voices and words on myself and make myself feel small. Eleanor Roosevelt has been reputed to have said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Which means that I have to ask myself, “If I feel small, insignificant, ugly, etc. what part did I play–when did I give consent–in making myself feel that way?”
Now all of this does not mean that I should not expect better from others, that I cannot hope for greater love, compassion, and basic human kindness and civility among people. It simply means that in the absence of those things, as best I can I need to provide for myself a sense of my own value and worthiness and of the value and worth of all beings. In short, I need to be kinder and gentler with myself, especially when I fail to live up to the sometimes impossibly high expectations I hold for myself. I am grateful for awakening to this new awareness. I will have to work hard not to lose sight of these revelations and fall into some of the same patterns of self-meanness I’ve lately been dealing with. Yep, I still have a lot of work to do, but every day I get a little bit closer to where I want to be. And for that, I am most definitely grateful.
