I Could Never Sell

If fear is everywhere, why don’t we see it?

Because it frightens us.  We hide from it.  We hide it from ourselves.

Where?  Along the spectrum of fear.  Fear, caution, and shenpa.

Fear

Look at dad doing homework with his 4th grade daughter, Alice.  Math.  She thinks she’s not good at math.  She’s in a special help group at school.  That smart Nikki makes fun of her.  Everyone runs to Nikki at recess.  Alice gets out of her chair every two minutes to do cartwheels.  Dad is losing patience.  Why does homework have to take two hours every night?  They could be done in half the time, if Alice would stay in her chair and listen.

Dad was good at math.  He tries to show her fun tricks, shortcuts that get to the answer faster.

She thinks he’s making it worse, making it take longer, make her learn twice as much.

Dad almost yells No more cartwheels.  But then he sees what this is.  Fear.  Alice is good at gymnastics and yoga.  The best.  So when she’s doing something she’s not good at, she interrupts often to do what she’s best at.  She interrupts math for gymnastics, and remembers what success and control feel like.

Dad understands that.  He’s good at explaining to people on the phone, but he can’t keep up with the guys who write the 3D algorithms.  So when he’s working at the algorithms, he interrupts often to make a phone call.

Or vice versa.  He doesn’t like the phone calls, and the sloppy way people talk, sing-song without choosing their words, not even hearing their words, saying “absolutely” because it has four syllables and they can hit four notes instead of one if they just said “Yes” or “Sure,” and they don’t care that “absolutely” actually means something, it doesn’t just mean “Sure.”  So after he makes a hard phone call he loses himself in algorithms for ten minutes or so, to remind himself what success and control feel like, and when he next looks at the clock because he’s getting tired, he sees that he’s been pushing through the algorithms for two hours, not ten minutes, and oops, there goes another day, off track.

Or Dad interrupts his work on algorithms to play Go or Solitaire on the computer, and flips the game out of view when Alice comes in the room, and he’s annoyed when she sits right behind him, because now he can’t finish his game, and it was so soothing to remember the feeling of success and control again, building walls of Go beads, a human mouse maze, as a hamster feels success and control spinning its wheel in a cage, the hamster form of cartwheels.

Cast a spell and save me!  Make me a hamster in a cage.  Make me a mouse in a maze.  Make me a lizard under a rock.  Make me a pillbug among the pebbles.  Anything, so long as I don’t perish.

Caution

When we organize our lives so we don’t bump into fear anymore, that’s caution.

Alice gets older and doesn’t take math anymore, she plans to teach dance.

Dad goes into sales and leaves the calculations to someone else.

Or Dad goes into engineering and leaves the phone calls to someone else.

Dad and Alice go down the same corridors each day, at school or work, corridors that steer a long route around fear, a maze of sameness that walls out fear, surprise, fright, doubt.  The music corridors, not the math corridors.  The sales corridors, not the engineering corridors.  Whatever.

Caution is fear squared, fear that has built hard walls against fear, and walled out any glimpse or chance of fear.  Caution is fear that has tied a life in knots, in long looping roads between the walls of home and the walls of work, looping roundabout roads to looping roundabout corridors.  A life that has walled out fear, and walled itself in.  Remember the drunk and cackling Fortunato in The Cask of Amontillado?  That laughter can go on for some time, in a life that has buried itself alive, but buried itself with plenty of roads and corridors to wander in the meantime, till death catches up.

Mind digs the Tunnels of Time
To flee the Sun of Now;
Heaps Catacombs of Due and Dun
Against the Flood of Light.

Shenpa

Shenpa is the breath the pillbug feels that makes it curl into an armored ball, keeping self in, and keeping all else out.

An example. You hear a new voice through your wall at work, the new hire, replacing your friend who left. The voice makes you clench your jaw, narrow your eyes, clench your hand like the pillbug.  She’s loud, she talks fast, she sings “absolutely” with all four syllables, and you can’t believe your boss hired someone like that for a team like this.  This was a good enough job till now.  Now it’s just a matter of time before you can’t stand it, or they can’t stand you.  You’ve seen this before, how it goes….  But you’ve got to keep this to yourself for now, till you think what to do.  The department will go to lunch together two hours from now, to meet the new team member, and you can’t act threatened.  Ho hum, that’s the way to play it.  If they go for drinks after work, or karaoke, to make the new person feel comfortable, in her element, you can’t let them see you squirm, so you’ll decline or leave early, because you’re tired from working hard at the work that still matters to this team, even if everyone else has forgotten.

Shenpa is the first instant of fear and caution.  Instantly the pillbug walls itself in, makes a maze of itself.  It cannot see fear, and makes itself invisible to fear, inside what looks like just another pebble, one more pebble among millions.  The pillbug’s progress towards the cool moist grass ceases in that instant.  It rolls into a ball, then rolls like a ball, without seeing or steering.  It rolls into a crack, where it cannot unfurl again.  Into a grate, a moving grate that grinds debris.  Into coils of heat, that dry and cook the pillbug over the hours and days.

Shenpa is the instant you choose blindness, for fear of seeing fear.  The instant you look inside at familiar nightmares and cannot see outside, cannot see a way ahead to hope and life and unthinkable love.  The instant a moblike debate in your head, a debate you’ve heard a thousand times, deafens you to hope and life and love calling to you from nearby, from just an arm’s length away.

Shenpa is your chance to catch fear at its beginning, at its smallest, when you can still roll it back, when you can still unclench the jaw, the eyes, the fingers, and look around again, and reach out again.

The pillbug can turn into a blind stone in one instant, rolling towards doom, and in the next instant unfurl and scurry again towards the sweet grass.

Shenpa is that first instant of fear, that flash or flicker of fear before fear hardens into caution and a life that hides in smallness, pretending to be dead and pretending to be alive.

Shenpa is the instant when we turn towards living or turn towards dying.  Like the air we breathe every moment, we hardly notice Shenpa.  Like the vibration in the atoms of the wood under our feet, Shenpa happens too fast to see.

But we can train at Shenpa, at seeing and catching its fluttering thread.  That thread unravels the shroud of fear.  That thread leads out of the maze.

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