All the mindfulness gurus and experts and we still don’t get it
A statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, Italy. Áilín Quinlan recalled his words of wisdom, that our life is what our thoughts make it.
“You,” he smirked, leaning against the wall of the house with his arms crossed, “reverse like a woman.”
Later, my friend, with whom my brunch was delayed because of what subsequently transpired – and, to my mind, as a direct result of this behaviour - was horrified.
“That is such a misogynistic thing to say,” she gasped.
Nice, smice, I told her, it was nothing to do with dyed-in-the-wool chauvinism. He was just trying to get a rise out of me.
“Stop saying things like that,” I shrieked at him out the driver’s window, well and truly risen.
"And stop grinning at me like that when I’m trying to reverse!"
He smirked.
The night before, my husband had parked his car right behind mine at the back of the house, blocking my exit.
This morning he had manoeuvred his vehicle backwards with impressive agility and speed, naturally – him being male and all – but, it must be stated, into the centre of the space we all use when we reverse our cars out around the side of our house.
As Jack Crawford, the Agent-in-Charge of the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI in Quantico, Virginia (for your information, his character is said to be modeled on John E Douglas,who held the same position in real life) tells his trainee Clarice Starling in , “if you assume when I send you on a job, Starling, you can make an ass out of u and me both.”
So, two things happened in very quick succession outside our house, both of them proving Crawford’s theory. My husband assumed that, despite being sneered at while in the process of reversing, I would notice that he had parked in the reversing place. As a result of being mocked and distracted for my reversing skills, I assumed he would never do anything that stupid.
Luckily for him, I reverse very cautiously (is this reversing like a woman?), so when the iron hitch he had recently attached to my bumper smacked into the front of his car, there was only a minor dent.
Maybe “smacked” is the wrong word here. Maybe “strongly pushed” would be more appropriate? But at any rate there was a relatively minor amount of cosmetic damage.
I was irate at being put into the wrong like this, I declared. Firstly, if he had NOT parked in the domestic reversing space, this would not have happened. Secondly, if he had NOT been so busily distracting and mocking me, I might not have assumed that he had parked in a sensible place.
And HE, I said wrathfully, would now not have to spend his Saturday muttering expletives as he panel-beat all that chauvinist-incurred damage out of the front of his bonnet.
With that I drove off towards my avocado-and-feta-cheese-on-toast-with-scrambled egg and coffee, leaving him staring at his car openmouthed. I’m not usually a Last Word Phobic, but this time I really needed it.
By the time I got home again, I was ready to accept that perhaps – just perhaps - I could have focused on the view in the rear mirror rather than what was going on at my right ear.
There is a lesson here, all the same. Our assumptions about things, as Jack Crawford said, can make an ass out of you and me both. They can make us blind to the obvious. The obvious that is literally right in front of us. Or, even, in our rearview mirror.
I was humbled. Not that I’d ever for one moment admit this to him.
I thought of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman warrior emperor and renowned philosopher. Our life, he said, is what our thoughts make it. So, when we think something is the case, that’s what we insist on seeing - and then we miss what’s actually there.
As Confucius said, life is simple, it’s just we insist on making it complicated. The Chinese philosopher was born more than 2,500 years ago. And he’s still relevant. Just as relevant as Jack Crawford in .
I thought about that for a moment.
About all the mindfulness gurus and consciousness experts who have been telling us the same thing ever since. And we still don’t get it.
App?
