I Yam What I Yam

"I'm having fun. I'm a kid. It's what we do." - A.B.'s 8-year-old niece from the top of the ferris wheel at Frontier City.

An adult is one who has lost the grace, the freshness, the innocence of the child, who is no longer capable of feeling pure joy, who makes everything complicated, who spreads suffering everywhere, who is afraid of being happy, and who, because it is easier to bear, has gone back to sleep. The wise man is a happy child. - Arnaud Desjardins in the Zen Calendar (November 16, 2006).

Day 177. I really do like seven's.

Today a client who is lucky enough to have a very wise eight-year-old niece shared the above quote. I usually sense when I am in the presence of greatness, and quickly told my client that her niece would be quoted on my blog. And she is!

For the rest of the day I have been torquing on the True Nature of things. My gut tells me this is the place from which all happiness radiates. I began to pay attention to people, animals and insects, noticing which beings were in tune with their True Nature. People (the ones over the age of five) are the worst at it, hands down. Dogs are probably the best (along with two-year-olds); June bugs, cicadas, and moths run a very close second.

I contemplated my own true nature and one of my earliest memories surfaced. I was between the ages of three and four, playing in the nursery at the old Methodist church my parents still attend. It was a Friday night, and my parents were attending a function with their Sunday School class. This was the mid 1960's, when parents had no qualms about leaving their children with two elderly care givers on a weekend night at an unlocked church in the inner city - my, how times have changed! While rambunctiously building a fort out of huge wooden blocks with the older kids, I looked around for my friend Jeff and couldn't find him. I went up to Miss Crump (that was her real name - no relation to the teacher on Andy Griffith as far as I know) and asked her where Jeff had gone. She explained that he had grown very tired and was in the "baby room" across the hall, sleeping on a cot.

I was intrigued by this news and became obsessed with a longing to lie down in the baby room myself. With three-and-a-half-year-old logic and cunning, I kept wandering around Miss Crump's chair (as I recall, the care givers rarely stood up), emitting exaggerated yawns, drooping my eyelids and loudly sighing. It had to be the most comedic impression of a tired toddler ever performed. The astute Miss Crump eventually inquired if I was tired. I answered with an enthusiastic "Yes!" and she led me to the darkened room across the hall, laid a baby blanket on one of the low green cots the church probably still has, told me I could lie down, and promptly left. I lay still in the darkness, pleased with my sleepiness impersonation. I distinctly remember laying there (I didn't sleep then, either) for what seemed like hours until I heard Miss Crump opening the door and my parents' voices as they wondered aloud about my uncharacteristic fatigue. I feigned sleep and did my best impersonation of drowsily sitting up to be carried out to the car.

What kind of freak child wants to leave the company of other children in a brightly lit, well-equipped play room to lie alone in the dark? (I have absolutely no memory of Jeff in the room - he must have been asleep). Evidently - ME! I recall several other occasions where I pulled the exact same stunt (whether there was another child laying down or not), never fell asleep, and waited patiently in the dark until my parents came to get me. (They didn't party every weekend at the church; this was probably three or four times a year). The really freaky thing is that as an adult, I absolutely empathize with that little girl laying on the cot. She is me, and I am still her. Though I have a bit more sophisticated coping skills now (most of the time!) I still get way overstimulated in brightly lit rooms filled with gaiety and my peers.

Fun stresses me out. I am in my element when my mind is entirely occupied with a task requiring cognitive torquing, focus, and attention. I thrive on accomplishing things. I suspect I stayed in the nursery while we were designing and building the forts, roads and tunnels with the big blocks. However, when it came time to actually PLAY in them, I was probably done. Worn out from bossing around the older kids regarding the engineering specs. If we weren't going to build something else, if productivity was being replaced with senseless frivolity, I was out of there. Headed for my green cot and some quiet time. My True Nature is to be deeply occupied or serenely alone. Not much in between. It was so when I was three, and still so now.

My mom inevitably tells two stories about my True Nature when I bring people home to Meet the Parents. In one of them, I am eighteen months old and she has just put me down in the back yard at our house on 67th Street when the phone rings and she dashes back into the house - "Just for a second." When she came back outside - "Less than a minute later" - she looked around the back yard and I had disappeared. She glanced at the yard to the east: no baby girl. Swiveled her gaze to the west and spotted her errant daughter - making a break for it and already two doors down. The minute her back was turned, I had race-toddled to the chain link fence, climbed it, crossed the next-door-neighbor's lawn on my nimble toddler legs, climbed their fence and was halfway across the next neighbor's property. I'm assuming she intercepted me before I reached the corner. She was, after all, a highly responsible mother.

That was, incontestably and veraciously, the essence of Me. I still can't be fenced in. I'm a wanderer, an explorer, an adventurist to the core. In all honesty, I still hop a mean fence. (Though there was that time I jumped over a gate while selling Campfire candy at the age of 10 and broke my arm. My responsible mother took me to have it set three days later. We've never let her live it down). My True Nature is a whacky combination of obsessive attention to duty and fearless physical exploits. When I am manifesting either or both, I'm having fun. I'm a Buddhist. It's what we do.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc