More Than I Can Count

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God . . . - Walt Whitman in the Zen Calendar (September 23, 2009)

Day 98. I'm reading the above quote and remembering every news headline I heard on NPR this morning. I am convinced that if we lived, past and present, according to Whitman's creed, this morning's news would be rendered null and void. If only.

I'm embarking upon a little endeavor that I think would be interesting for all of us to try. Here is the assignment: Pick the news source of your choice, and listen/read/watch for the average daily amount of time you usually devote to consuming the news. Jot down the numbers (quantities, amounts, totals, statistics, estimates) you hear, no matter what the context. Total them up. Here is the tricky part: Meaningfully comprehend the numbers, both individually and in total. Apply them to the story from which they were derived.

Yup. Can't be done. I listened to NPR for about 25 minutes between 8:15 and 8:40 this morning. I didn't actually log the numbers I heard because I hadn't yet formulated this specific idea. My rough estimate of the total for my 25 minutes of exposure is just under 2 gazillion. This includes numbers pertaining, but not limited to: the Gulf oil spill, a bailout of Greece, general debt in the E.U., stimulation dollars in the U.S., unemployment rates, housing foreclosures, the DOW Dance, tornado damage estimates, and flood carnage in Tennessee. Somewhere in the sports department there must have been something about coach's salaries and/or a rookie's signing bonus. Lots and lots of numbers, most of which quantified money. Not the paper or coin variety of money. Not the concrete, tangible tender that you can fold in a wallet or jingle in a pocket. The virtual, hypothetical, number-in-somebody's-column kind of money.

When I was a girl of ten (that age when Knowing Things is of tantamount importance), my dad helped me grasp how much a million was. This was around 1971, when One Million was still a sizable number. A thousand thousands. A thousand thousands. Five hundred thousand was half a million. The 3-bedroom house we lived in at the time cost about $20,000. A Million dollars would pay for 50 of the houses my parents were planning to take 30 years to pay off (my mom told me later that our house payment then was $118 per month!) I would lie in bed at night thinking and thinking and THINKING about One Million. It seemed like a terribly whole lot, but I could get a solid mental grasp around the concept. Once I thought about it long and hard, "a million" meant something precise to me.

Remarkable as it sounds, it was about another ten years before I similarly grappled with "a billion" (hey, we were middle class, what can I say?) A thousand millions. A thousand millions. I never could attain the same level of comprehension for a billion that I finally accomplished with a million. I didn't even bother with a trillion. When my brain sidles up to that number as a quantifiable and finite amount, I get the same feeling as when I meditate and tip over into the blue/black nothingness. It's tantalizing and terrifying at the same time. Both are incomprehensible.

My point is that the numbers we are exposed to today have no meaningful connection to our concrete existence. We are routinely inundated with such outrageous quantities, they have lost any applicable reality. We are immune to excess. If we could really apply "this many billion" and "that many trillion" in a sensible and accurate context, we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. It would be entirely too overwhelming. So we tune the numbers out. And if we tune them out, how can we experience feelings and cognition about actions to take regarding the numbers? If they don't have personal meaning, we are unlikely to care and even more unlikely to act. If we don't begin to care about some of the realities these numbers are pertaining to, I'm pretty sure we're going to be blind-sided with some HIGHLY applicable and meaningful consequences. And I'm not just talking about the price of a ticket to Greece.

When my good friend Anna and I are spinning out on emotion and hypotheticals during a late-night phone conversation, one of us will say to the other, "Wash your cup." This phrase dates back to a story I told her about Zen masters exchanging wisdom, which ultimately always culminated with the necessity of washing the cups holding the tea while wisdom was (or wasn't!) being exchanged. For us, it means, "Stick with what is tangible. Concentrate on the concrete. Put your energy into things you can touch. Pay attention to what is REAL." Many breakdowns have been thwarted with this sage advise. It snaps us succinctly back to where we have control. To what we can grasp. To action where action matters.

This is the beauty of Zen. We stick with what matters. A zillion notes are sounded in the chirping of one cricket's legs. What matters is that we HEAR the sound in the night outside our open window. Listen to your news source. Total the numbers. Then go wash your cup.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc