Was It "Good" For You?

Have you ever had something happen in your life that you thought you REALLY wanted only to discover later that it led you face-to-face with something you would rather have plucked out every last hair on your body one-by-one with a set of tweezers than face?  Ever been dealt a horrible card that justified viewing the world from behind a high wall of righteous anger until, further down the road, it dawned on you that without that card and the path it put you on, you never would have reached the much better place you eventually found yourself?  Ah yes, nothing quite like being shoved kicking and screaming out of the comfort zone and just plain having to deal with it!  How do we know whether the thousand little things that happen in our lives every day can be classified as "good" or "bad"?  It's such a temptation to judge something definitively when it's happening, especially if it fits into our "bad" category, rather than to try and talk ourselves off the ledge and slow down our hyperventilating long enough to see what will come next.

In terms of how people size up a situation, I think there are "black and white" people in the world and there are "shades of gray" people.  I definitely fall into the latter camp (probably why I almost went to law school), though I'm still working on learning to talk myself down from that ledge quicker these days than in the past.  Thank goodness for time and the clarity that comes with hindsight.  I believe the ability to see both the good and the bad of a situation or a person is what allows us to live civilly and to maintain some level of compassion and humility in a situation that we don't otherwise truly understand.

A while back I was listening to one of the podcasts that I follow, NPR's Planet Money.  Between February and July, Planet Money did several episodes that followed a Haitian businesswoman named Yvrose Jean Baptiste.  Her story is, I think, a tidy example of why it's tricky to conclude that something is "good" or "bad" in the moment.  (For the record, I am summarizing the excellent reporting done by Adam Davidson, Chana Joffe-Walt, and Caitlin Kenney.)  It goes like this:  Yvrose, a married mother with four children, was introduced to podcast listeners in a Haitian marketplace.  She was carrying a big tub of chicken necks on her head and selling them for pennies in the local marketplace shortly after the earthquake.  Before the earthquake, she'd had a stable business as a small level wholesaler, which depended on her obtaining regular microloans at a certain rate, purchasing inventory (food items), and extending credit to small retailers under terms that racked up a modest profit for her as she fronted them items to sell at the retail level, and then collected her money a couple of weeks later.  This was certainly a sound business model.  It's what US bankers do every day, with the difference being that Yvrose operated with such a thin margin of error, that it was essential that everything go right, always.  And for a time in her life, it did.  She was able to help purchase a home for her family and send her children to school - rather serious success for a women with only a fifth grade education.  And then the earthquake hit.

Not only did Yvrose's house collapse, but all of the homes of her 10 small retailers were destroyed (a few died in the quake), along with every last bit of the $500 U. S. dollars worth of goods she had distributed to them on the day before the earthquake.  But the bank survived, and as she still owed approximately $100 U. S. dollars, payment was expected.  So in an act of what I imagine must have been desperate optimism, Yvrose borrowed from a loan shark at a much higher interest rate to buy the chicken necks to sell in hopes of making enough money over time to pay back the microloan, and stay ahead of the loan shark. 

The podcast aired and some listeners wanted to help her.  An account was set up in her name through a microlending institute in Haiti, and $3,860.00 was donated to her.  In March, she withdrew it all (several years' worth of wages), more money than she had ever seen or held in her hands.  She immediately paid off her debt, put some in the bank, refused to buy anything she considered non-essential, and paid for her four children to go live in the countryside with relatives and attend school.  The rest of the money she invested in her business. 

As a result, Yvrose now has a tin-roofed, semi-permanent stand in a local marketplace where she maintains a broad selection of items.  She currently makes $20 to $30 per day, which is life changing money for her and her children.  If affords her the ability to access medical care when necessary.  Her goal is to get her children through high school, and she no longer has to interrupt their education because she can't pay the school fees.  Her cash flow has stabilized and debt no longer hangs over her head.  

It sounds like everything had turned around for Yvrose, and that life was on a good course, except for one dark spot in her story. Shortly after receiving the money and paying off her debts and re-establishing her business, Yvrose's husband left her. Turns out that the power shift in their household was too much for him to take. Now she worries that she has no man in her tent (she still lives in temporary shelter) to protect her from potential thugs who might want to steal from her, or worse. Despite this, she said that she is generally optimistic about her future for the first time in her life, and who knows, even her husband leaving may prove to be a good thing eventually.

I think the twists and turns of this story are a prime example of why it is a seductive misstep to conclude that something is "good" or "bad" in the moment.  Every situation contains what appears to be "good" and "bad" in varying measures, but even those we judge one way or the other, when viewed from some distance may end up looking like the exact opposite of what we initially thought them to be.

Cuts Like a Knife

I have a bit of a hard edge to me.  Typically I think of it as providing me with that special little something that keeps me from rolling over and completely taking it when life presents me with a rough situation.  I'll show you, world!  I won't politely stand by when I think an offense has been committed against me.

I've always liked this part of me, at least to some degree, when I keep it reigned in - a tool rather than a character defect.  Ever since I left the somewhat cutthroat world of lobbying and began staying home with children, I've had to fight to keep myself from feeling like I've become a complete grass eater since the world of stay-at-home Moms that I navigate daily is fronted by a nicer facade and is much less confrontational than lobbying.  (Perhaps it just requires a different subset of my diplomatic skills.)  That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I like knowing that I have this tool I can employ to keep people from viewing me as a pushover.  Unfortunately, like all personalty traits that work when meted out in reasonable doses, my edge turns into something more ominous and revealing about me at times, like one morning last May.

I seemed to have rolled out of bed with foul mood fully intact that morning.  I yelled at the kids for the better part of an hour as they thwarted my efforts to hustle them off to school with anything resembling efficiency, and finally dropped them at carpool.  Oh, sweet relief.  On my way back home during morning rush hour, I was sitting at a stop sign of a five-way intersection waiting for another car to turn left in front of me.  Because this intersection is a little funky, harried drivers often get impatient while waiting for each other to figure out whose turn it is to go, resulting in horn honking or bad-mouthing from behind the perceived safety of rolled up windows.  I let the car make its turn, which required a few extra seconds of waiting to those cars behind me, and just as I began to make my own turn, the car directly behind me gave a longish honk.  I did what any edgy person does and lifted my hand and gave a big, fat "up yours" to the honking driver, which I regretted about two seconds afterward when I noticed a hand waving to me from the unfamiliar car.

About half a minute later, my cell phone rang and my friend Mack (who is seriously one of the nicest people I know) asked if I was the irritated, not-yet-fully-caffeinated, carpool Mom who had just given him the finger at the intersection.  Yep, the honker behind me was my friend and husband's co-worker merely trying to wave "hello" to me while on his way to work.  In fact, he'd been on the phone with my husband as the whole thing went down, so Steve got to hear all about it in real time.

Laughing uncomfortably, I tried to explain myself and rationalize my behavior with weak excuses - that I thought I was being honked at by some impatient jerk who couldn't stand to wait a few extra seconds at a stop sign, that I didn't know what his new car looked like, etc.  I sheepishly tripped all over myself apologizing for having been the only jerk at the intersection that day.  He chuckled and said it was alright.  I told him I was really glad that he had been the person on the receiving end of my digitus impudicus rather than someone who would be less amused by my rude driving antics, such as one of the parents I barely knew from my kids' school (did I mention I was the PTA President last year?)

I exhaled loudly as I hung up the phone and then proceeded to spend the better part of that day unable to shake how truly awful I felt about my behavior.  I couldn't get out of my mind what an almost-instantaneous reaction it had been for me to flip someone off in traffic when they honked at me, just because I was in a crappy mood.  What the hell was wrong with me?  What did that mean about what really lives in me at the deep core and drives my so-called "edgy" behavior?  Why was I so mad?  Why was I so reactionary?  Why can't I just be calmer and be the "bigger person"?  At 41, why haven't I cultivated a more reasonable perspective about what's worth responding to and what's worth shrugging off?  Moreover, why do I choose to respond to things that I actually know I should shrug off?

And that angst-riddled, internal questioning sums up my life-long spiritual struggle of forever trying to get to the peaceful place that I know resides somewhere in me so I can wrap myself in it and quiet the cacophony of harsh voices yelling at me that I am broken and need to do and be better.  When I imagine what that peaceful place would look like were it a physical presence, I can't help but think of Mohandas Ghandi - slight and unassuming, easily underestimated but undeniably powerful, exuding calm knowing, and standing silently with a welcoming smile and arms open just waiting for me to choose to come to it.  And when I do, the world goes quiet for just a little while, and somehow I find a way, for that short period of time, to be okay with who I am, warts and all.

Over the past few years I've found myself drawn to Buddhist philosophy, mostly because it says that we are who we are, and that suffering in this world comes from wishing that reality was something other than it is, or wishing that I would be someone at my core other than who I actually am.  When I embrace this notion, I find that I can adjust my behaviors in ways I feel good about.  But to do that, I have to pause for just a tic, and shift my thinking slightly so I move beyond habitually reacting to having one of my buttons pushed.  I don't know if I will ever get to the point where I can truly be peace and project that out into the world with any reliability, but I do know that I haven't flipped off anyone in traffic since last May.