Blame
"Regard everything that happens as if you had chosen it. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.” —Marcus Aurelius
Today was challenging, and I’m trying to determine what the day was trying to teach me.
I’m teaching a class of 16 women how to use an IPad. Their ages are from 70-88. They’ve never seen an iPad and don’t know how to use any technology other than their cell phone which they can only answer when it rings. That is not meant to be a criticism, only a fact.
Five of the women only speak Spanish. I’ve been provided with an interpreter, meaning I have a table of 5 people in the room engaged in an ongoing conversation with the interpreter while I’m teaching the class. It’s a small room so that doesn’t go unnoticed by the rest of the class. But wait, there’s more.
The organizers of this project sent three people to the class today who have missed almost half of the class. They were asking questions that the rest of the class had already covered. They seemed to be oblivious to how this was slowing down the class and creating frustration among the other participants.
I could feel the tension rising in the room and was doing my best to bring it down when I noticed the interpreter, who is part of our team, becoming angry. She slammed her hands on the table and complained loudly about Apple IDs not being set up.
Then, my other teammate challenged me in front of the class and argued with me about what I was teaching. There’s more.
A woman who has been a very positive and engaged participant erupted in an angry, rude tirade about her resentment of the people who have come into the class so late.
The tension prevented any additional learning about the iPad for that day so I dismissed the class early.
On the way home, I was in full-blame mode - blaming my co-workers, the students, and the organizers of the class. I was working up a lot of anger and fantasizing about what I was going to say to the woman who challenged me and everyone else who had a part in disrupting the class. I was questioning their character, intelligence, discipline, and lack of professionalism.
Blaming can offer temporary comfort. I can pull myself up in all of my perceived superiority and feed my ego which craves and demands superiority. My ego was a greater problem than what happened in the class.
"Blame is simply the discharging of discomfort and pain. It has an inverse relationship with accountability. Accountability by definition is a vulnerable process. It means calling yourself out. Blame is simply the easy way out.” —Brene Brown
At this old age of 81, I’ve made some progress in taming my ego, or at least I thought I had made progress. Of course, the fact that I'm praising myself for taming my ego is a sign that I haven’t succeeded in that task. And now it’s just as soft and protective as it was when I was a teenager.
I did not like this part of myself that was waking up. Maybe this is what is meant by our shadow, that part of ourselves that we don't want to reveal to the world or even to ourselves.
The ego is the filter through which we see everything. What would it be like if I could see things as they actually are, not as how they affect me?
I reminded myself of some advice I gave the class to help them deal with their frustration and anxiety about learning technology: Everything is a lesson and everybody is a teacher. Whatever happens, good or bad, is there to teach us something if we’re open to learning.
Maybe I should take my own advice. What do I need to learn from this? Instead of blaming others, I started asking myself some questions.
What role did I play in that situation? No self-blame, just explore if I might have contributed in some way. When I got out of the “What did you do?” question and into the “What did I do, or not do?” question, I could see some things that I could have done differently. I’m becoming my own therapist asking questions that lead me to the threshold of my own understanding. Everything is a lesson and everybody is a teacher. Now, I’m allowing the situation to be a lesson and those people to be my teachers.
According to David Cooperrider, the author of Appreciative Inquiry, we create our world by the questions we ask.
Let me ask another question. Why bother? Brene Brown’s advice is hard. Blaming is easy. Why not just stay in the blaming mode, continue to feed my ego, and feel superior to others? My answer to that question is that unless we believe that we have a soul behind our ego that is calling us toward love, we will not bother.
Richard Rohr, a Christian Mystic and one of the great spiritual teachers of our time has written and thought deeply about love. He is the same age as me. When most people our age have settled into their own baked-in opinions about everything, he is still on his own Hero’s Journey into his soul.
It’s recognizing, “Richard, you don’t know how to love at all” that keeps me on the path of love. Constant failure at loving is ironically and paradoxically what keeps us learning how to love. When we think we’re there, there’s nothing to learn. —Richard Rohr
I talked myself off the ledge on the way home and thought about how to turn this into a positive, learning experience for me and, hopefully, for others.