How Not to Be a Hot Mess - A Survival Guide for Modern Life - Craig Hase Page 0,11

twenty-five, telling everyone else (age range eighteen to eighty) what to do. Not that I was particularly dictatorial, I think. But busy, for sure. And a little visionary sometimes. There was stuff to get done and I had a plan and I wanted people—e.g., Anthony—to step to the vision.

And so I ran my meetings like clockwork. Or as my friend Matt later told me, like boot camp. Okay, I admit it, there were spreadsheets. There were timelines. And there was building frustration on my part, since the actual world was, very often, not conforming to my spreadsheets and my timelines.

It all came to a head on a crystalline February day. Thirty strapping volunteers from a local college were on their way to campus. We were going to do fire mitigation—a pressing concern for the monastery, since our surrounding desert mountains were a tinderbox of brush and low branches, just waiting to go up in flames.

I’d arranged for three professionals to arrive with their chain saws. They’d be cutting all day. I’d arranged for each available member of the monastic community to lead a work group of five college kids. They’d be hauling all day. I was in the middle of downloading the vision, psyching up the troops, clarifying the details, when Anthony raised his hand.

“Yes, Anthony,” I said.

“What time is lunch?” he said.

I was flummoxed. Lunch? We were about to move mountains! “Who cares?” I said.

And then I went back to explicating the hauling routes and assigning the responsibilities.

After the meeting, I was walking into the kitchen when Anthony came from behind, spun me around by the shoulder, and threw me up against the wall.

Suddenly, everything went very slowly. I noticed that his face was a startling shade of red, almost purple. His eyes looked red, too. There was a single bead of sweat on his forehead. And his breath smelled like coffee and milk.

As Anthony shook me and slammed me, he was saying things. For example, “If you ever talk to me that way again, I will cut your throat.”

But already my mind was tracking back over the last several minutes. Clearly, I had done something that really pissed Anthony off. At first I was a little too dumb to know what it was. But my mind tracked back, tracked back, and then realized it was that moment I’d blown off his question about lunch.

Simultaneously, I saw there existed a whole range of options before me, almost like radio stations. Except instead of choosing between NPR and classic rock, my mind started flipping through disparate cultural scripts, little memes that might be appropriate for just such an occasion. For instance, I’m from New York, and the New York radio station was enticing me to throw a punch. Thankfully, though, the Buddhist radio station also clicked on, even stronger. I saw, all of a sudden, how I had come into the meeting all jazzed up, a little manic. I saw how my empathy in the meeting was low. I saw how I had needlessly insulted Anthony, made him feel small. And I saw my low empathy and subsequent belittling as the cause of the present death threat.

So I relaxed. “Anthony,” I said. “I messed up. Sorry. Just one of those days.”

He looked confused for a moment. Then I watched his face cycle through its own range of emotions—watched him try to remain angry, then confused again, then sad, then just tired. He dropped my shirt and walked away.

I wish I could say I always have that level of insight. It would have been nice, for example, to hold my tongue that time in the trailer in the New Mexico wilderness, when a benzo-popping Forest Service employee named Jane threw a blender full of hot soup at my head. (Yes, that really happened.) In that moment with Jane, I had a similar radio station moment, in which I watched a bunch of options whiz right by me—and chose, consciously, unequivocally—to go to war. We ended up screaming at each other for forty-five minutes. And the next day, the director of our Forest Service division fired us both.

That time I was twenty-two. So one tidy story is that between the ages of twenty-two, when I went to war unnecessarily with Jane, and twenty-eight, when I kept the peace, more or less, with Anthony, I had made great spiritual progress. Still a jerk, kind of. But I knew I was a jerk and acted with benevolence about my jerkiness.

The truth, though, is that