Not Knowing

On its way from Manhattan to Brooklyn, the D train takes a dramatic journey over the Manhattan Bridge, offering a stunning view of downtown, the Hudson River, and, in the distance, the Statue of Liberty.

Most of us, being New Yorkers, don’t pay attention. 

The other day on the train, I noticed that literally every person in the subway car was on their phones.  Most were alone, though some seemed to be in groups or pairs.  All had their heads inclined downward toward the little screens we carry around every day.

It’s at this point that, I think, many meditation teachers would bemoan the fate of our distracted digital age.  I’ve moaned in that way before.  If only we could be more present, yada yada yada. But that’s not actually what I want to say.

Instead, what occurred to me this time was different: how, actually, I had no idea what they were doing or what they were going through, and really had no business judging them or their choices.

I mean, who knows?  Maybe they were texting relatives in the hospital.  Maybe they were setting up a date.  Maybe they were playing Candy Crush Saga, or reading the news, or listening to music, or – anything, really.  And who knows where each person was going to or leaving from, whether their day had been filled with hard work or delight or indolence or grief. Maybe they were just relaxing, and what was so wrong with that? Really, despite the reflexive judginess that I once mistook for being “into meditation,” I knew absolutely nothing about what was going on. 

This felt enormously freeing.  I didn’t need to feel superior, to cluck at their benighted actions, or to feel depressed about the zombification of the world.  I could just.. not know. What a relief!

It was also really interesting to see how my identity as “meditation teacher” could so easily become another way to divide the world into us and them, with my team, of course, being the virtuous, non-phone-addicted one. That all-too-human desire to feel better-than can show up even in a context in which, supposedly, we’re working toward more compassion, patience, and humility.  They are phone addicts, but I am a meditation teacher who knows better.  Of course, beneath that desire lurks the fear that I, too, waste too much time on my devices. I’m projecting my own shadow onto others.

Now, as someone who, in addition to my Ten Percent work, works as a journalist who writes opinion pieces, I am literally paid to be judgmental.  I have a lot of strong opinions.  But, you know, it’s possible to both have strong ideological commitments and still refrain from judging and presuming things about other people. To be sure, I think it’s appropriate to have strong ethical views about, say, racism and sexism, or science and democracy, for that matter. But it’s also the case that I don’t really know what a given person really thinks, or why they think it. It might be better if I didn’t make as many assumptions.

We live in a time in which many people feel sure that others are acting in bad faith or with sinister motives.  We often presume the worst, wherever we find ourselves on the ideological spectrum.

From a contemplative perspective, it can be really fruitful to explore that tendency. What’s happening, in the moment that it arises?  Personally, I’ve sometimes noticed a kind of misdirected anger.  I’m concerned about the way the internet amplifies chaos, violence, and anger, and so I take it out on the people on their phones on the subway.  Even though, again, I have no idea whether they’re posting conspiracy theories or looking for a good chicken recipe.

There’s also, I think, a slightly nobler but still misguided sense that I am responsible for the well-being of others and/or the world.  There are positive expressions of this sense of responsibility: it’s one of the reasons I teach meditation and write about politics in the first place.  It’s good to want to help.

But that well-meaning desire can easily slide into arrogance, since of course I know what’s best more than you do.  Sometimes, that inability to live and let live even translates into the attempt to control the lives of others.  Sometimes even to oppression.

Of course, my moment on the D train was a lot smaller than all of that. But it’s also true that large trends in our society are expressions of the human mind, with all its wonderful and terrible capacities. And as you can experience in your own meditation, those same tendencies are also expressed in small moments. 

Fortunately, in the moment that mindfulness becomes aware of an assumption, a judgment, or a presumption regarding other people, there is the possibility of freedom.  In that brief instant of spaciousness, there arises the capacity to choose whether to feed and express those desires, or perhaps instead to notice them, acknowledge them, but not hand them the microphone.  It’s not an exaggeration to say that the existence of this possibility offers me profound consolation.