Prison

 

 

I have recently started corresponding with a man in prison, I’ll call him Jonathan, who has developed a strong interest in Buddhist teachings and has been practicing for a number of years.  At some point, I asked him how long he still had to serve before he was released.  He said fourteen years. I don’t know what answer I was expecting but the words “fourteen years” hit me like a weight.  How does someone deal with such a sentence?  How would I deal with it if it were facing me?  What would Buddhist teachings tell us to do?  Is there a lesson in this for all of us?

                When I sat with these questions, things I had learned began to bubble up.  The first thing that surfaced was that, for me, it was a certainty that I must not live for the future—crossing days off the calendar and thinking “5,110 days until I am released.”  Or thinking thoughts like “When I get out, then my life will begin again.”  The truth would be that my life is happening now, and a year of my life now is worth every bit as much as a year of my life 14 years from now.  Whatever years I have left in my life, I don’t want any of them to be squandered waiting for some future moment to arrive and viewing the present moment as something only to be endured and gotten over with.  This is living in an imaginary future and missing my real life in this moment.

In Buddhism there is a teaching about putting conditions on your happiness.  This happens when we say to ourselves “I’ll be happy when I lose ten pounds, or when I get a better job, or when I find a life partner…”  We believe that in order to be happy, certain conditions must be met first.  But this only ensures that we will be unhappy as long as the conditions we have set have not been fulfilled.  When we are in touch with the present moment, we know that the conditions for happiness are always available right here, right now.  We can be happy because a bird is singing outside, or because we feel the warmth of the sun on our skin, or because we just witnessed someone perform a small act of kindness.  Cultivating gratitude for the good that is here now is also a very powerful practice in connection with this.

Right now, my life needs to be such that when I get up every morning I have things I want to do and that mean something to me. I'm writing a book, or a blog, or an article.  I'm being there to help family and friends and strangers.  If I’m in prison, I'm helping other prisoners find meaning in their lives right now.  I'm corresponding with kids in juvenile detention and helping them to straighten out their lives.  Jonathan told me that:

“Making my daily life worthwhile is very important. Even if it's something small. Many days the most important thing I do is to clean a toilet in the Psychology Department where I work because everyone deserves a clean place to use the toilet. It's a way for me to express caring in a place that struggles to care.  I find that having just one important meaningful thing in a day causes a cascade of other important things to radiate out from it.”  

                The more I sat with my cluster of questions, the more I realized that the lessons here don’t just apply to extreme cases like long prison sentences.  In looking back over my own life, I remember two memorable periods of time when I responded to situations in a dysfunctional manner.  For twelve years, first grade through twelfth grade, I spent my time simply enduring my hours in the classroom, watching the clock and counting down the minutes, complaining to myself about how boring it was.  If I had been less ignorant, I could instead have spent my time searching for ways to make the time meaningful. Instead, I was constantly waiting for recess, waiting for lunch, waiting for the end of the school day, waiting for summer or Christmas vacation—which was when “real life” would finally start.  Of course, at such an early age and state of ignorance, it was nearly impossible for me to have this realization, but with an appropriate mentor my whole life might have been very different.

I did the same thing again later when I was working a collection of part time teaching jobs for a period of some years.  I spent my time spinning out mental stories: “This is unfair, I’m much better qualified than most of the fulltime teachers, they’re paid much more for the same amount of work, they have a benefits package and I don’t, when I get a full time job then life will be the way it is supposed to be…”  I think we’ve probably all done this in various ways. 

Because I was ignorant, it took me a very long time to shift into an attitude of “Like it or not, this is the way things are right now.  Accept it as if you had wished for it.”  It also helped me when i stopped looking at only the things that were lacking in my job situation.  Instead, I needed to look for what I could do to make my life meaningful now.  As it turned out, my life was already wonderful in many ways that I just wasn’t seeing. Though it was true that my pay was low compared to others, job security poor, and I had no benefits package…  It was equally true that I had more than enough income to have the things I truly wanted and needed, as a part time faculty member I did not have to go to any boring faculty or committee meetings, I was working a reduced number of hours that allowed me to pursue other interests, and I loved the actual work of teaching.  Once I got past my focus on what I did not have, I realized I had a great job!

These are two stories from earlier in my life.  There are countless other stories of having to deal with being “sentenced to something” (which is, of course, a mind-created story).  Some people are “victims” of genetics, and have been “sentenced” to being too short, too tall, their ears stick out too far, they have body proportions or facial features that are “bad,” they are unathletic, physically weak, have severe spinal curvature from birth or from childhood polio, a weak heart from early scarlet fever, deaf, blind.  There are people who are “sentenced” to not being able to have sex because of an injury, or having to live after losing a leg, or a loved one or their whole family, or their home, or having to permanently leave their native country.  If we start telling ourselves “victim stories” each of these things have the potential to “ruin” our lives.

One of the unskillful habits we often fall into in these situations is to expend a great deal of time and energy complaining about our situation:  my jail sentence was too harsh, my lawyer did a bad job, my parents didn’t love me…   I know for a certainty that spending any time complaining is something that I do NOT want to be doing anymore—it uses vast amounts of energy, increases my suffering, and accomplishes nothing useful.  And when I was trapped in this habit, I typically complained to people who had absolutely no ability to do anything to improve my situation! Eckardt Tolle said something that has always stuck with me: “Accept the reality of the present moment as if you had wished for it.”  And he was right, of course—I needed to stop mentally resisting the truth of this moment, which was only causing me to experience unnecessary suffering. 

When I do this, my suffering is relieved and it becomes easier to have clarity about what action I need to be taking.  And if there is something I can do to try to improve the present situation, it is important that I then make the effort and do it. 

Jonathan had an interesting way of looking at this business of complaining.  He said that he sometimes looks at his situation as if he had been hit by a hurricane or some other natural disaster.  The event limits his choices, but he still needs to make the most skillful choices from the options available.  Beyond this, this metaphor is also useful in that it shifts things so that what has happened is no longer taken personally—I’m no longer taking it as something done specifically to ME.  It’s just the weather, and it is not personal. 

I have found this to be such a useful practice in interactions with people.  So yes, this person in front of me is raging at me, but it is something that is coming out of who they are—their present fears, insecurities, and lack of knowledge.  It’s not really about me.  I just happen to be living in the path of a hurricane and need to take steps to deal with it, and it serves no useful purpose to rage back at it or complain that the hurricane is unfair.  When I remember this, I suffer a lot less.

Jonathan also said that he often thinks about spiders: “Spiders don't complain when their web is destroyed. They don't sit in despair bemoaning their loss. They just rebuild the web, and they'll do it over and over again.” Spiders don’t complain about the unfairness of it all or hate the “perpetrator” that destroyed their web.  They just deal with the issue and do what needs to be done.  This seems like great wisdom to me.   

One last piece of the picture that Jonathan brought to light was his commitment to practicing unconditional responding  (See blog post Responding Unconditionally, September 15, 2024, for a fuller explanation).  “I will treat prisoners and corrections officers with caring even if they don't reciprocate. As a result, I am experiencing a much different kind of time here than others do. It's less stressful for me, it's simpler.”

Nelson Mandela, by totally accepting his situation, and by treating fellow prisoners and his captors with genuine caring and by working for the welfare of all, was able to leave prison after 27 years without bitterness or emotional scarring.  Practices that are do-able under these circumstances can surely be powerful tools for us as well.

 

 

 

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