Just when I thought I was getting somewhere, you know, the place on the inside, the place where many of us think it matters most, my Ugly will pop up, take over, and I"ll reveal myself to be very, humanly nasty. I've been walking out the weirdest resolution this past few years, which was to silently pray for a stranger I passed in life everyday. That person might be a face on a newspaper page, a story on TV, or a person in the grocery store, but regardless of how they showed up in my life I did just that. I said a silent prayer for someone special who stood out to me. Along the way I began to briefly say an almost whispered hello to people, to tell them that they were my 'special stranger'. The stories that poured forth from those meetings, the stories that continues to pour forth from these brief encounters every week of my life, bring a real smile to my face. I'm not a very smiley person either. Ask anyone. But while I may not be smiley I am a bit on the spiritual side. I remember the orphans. I cry when parts of the world unravel on the evening news. I hurt when the innocent hurt, the old are isolated, or someone's heart is breaking for any reason. And yet . . .
Life can suddenly catch me in a little bit of a storm and I raise a head that might rival the snake-infested profile of Medusa. Any storm. Too many telemarketers on a given evening. (God bless them for just trying to put food on the table and I try to remember that too.) Being put on ringy dingy hold for three hours, getting disconnected, redirected, and misunderstood when you are just trying to straighten out a charge of $38.95 on your phone bill that doesn't belong there. Or the classic news from the automobile garage that your car is going to need a new thingymagig thing to replace the broken one that expired two days ago under warranty.
Which brings me face to face with one of my ugliest, most uninspired moments.
My jeep suddenly stopped running after it had been in the shop for about a month from an accident involving three ninja deer, the dead of night, and me. Somehow the wrong part had been ordered, and then something else, and so on and so forth so that the repairs were being completed seem to drag out to the Netherlands of a no man's land. My rental car insurance expired. I languished at home, and lamented a lot about my needing my jeep. I do a great job of lamenting. I live in the woods, I always seem to have places to go and work to do and car keys in hand equals a good thing for me. Stranded, not so good. I morph into a person that I wouldn't want as a spiritual role model.
And that is exactly, precisely what happened on this day. It was the glorious first day that I had been able to get behind the wheel of my vehicle in a month, my to do list just ticking off ninety to nothing in my mind, my jeep suddenly stopped running in the middle of traffic in the heart of Nashville. I would love to say that the remembrance of things gets a little hazy at this point but it does not. For a few silent minutes I unraveled ever so gently. Then some kind of storm shook me with this kind of righteous I told you so wrath. By the time I reached the repair shop I was vile. My heart was filled with nothing but anger and I left a black cloud like a creature from some alien Star Trek encounter in my wake. Fumes. Disgust. Despair. All of this as the dealership loaned me a car, as they tried their best to appease me with soft words and right actions. Nothing would make me happy except to have exactly what I wanted immediately - my own vehicle operating perfectly now! Right now! Ah, yes. And to think that I had been wrapped in this lovely spiritual cocoon of praying for strangers for a year. One would think I would be more enlightened, more evolved. That I had reached some level of nirvana where I was at Peace with myself and the world at large. But that wasn't the case. Instead, I showed the only side of me that those people have ever seen. And I never went back. To be perfectly honest - I embarrassed myself and trying to bridge that gap has left me, well, hiding. What I realized after the fact, after making so many amazing connections with strangers is that if I didn't burn some bridges completely down that day by my attitude, I sure did smoke a few to smithereens.
But the rub is . . . I'm never going to be that perfect Zen person, walking through the world with the smile of Buddha, the heart of Christ, or the peace of Sister Rosemary, a nun I loved to visit as a child. I won't be the person who gets it right everyday. And some days, I turn so ugly in my tiny world I don't want my own company. Because I have enough understanding of time, space, truth and what's most important to realize - my car problems aren't really what eternal enlightenment is wrapped up in.Or who wins on American Idol, marries the Bachelor, or the shenanigans on 30 Rock. I'm bombarded with more opportunities for entertainment than enlightenment in this wild, manic culture of ours. But the gritty truth is in the midst of all that 'stuff' running through my living room via the TV, my mind, and up the backbone of my most ugly days - I still care about what is taking place in Japan, the Middle East, and my own neighborhood. I still cry over the orphans in Rwanda and the lost, lonely, silence of shut-in's. I hope when all is said and done, I'll also be measured also for moments where I got it right. Where I spoke to a stranger, complimented someone, brushed their sleeve, and wished them blessings.
There is no amount of Ugly behavior on my part, or yours that will erase the sacredness of the times where we connected soul-to-soul, wanting the very best for one another. All the television hours in our lives, wasted or not wasted, look at it however you will, doesn't dissolve that extra five minutes you took to chat with someone on the bus. To listen to them. To even shake their hand, share your name. Heaven, Nirvana, and all our other personal ideas of a perfect world may be a long way off but I'm still believing that we can experience pieces of the best of what's to come right here. Right now.
And right now, in this very real World, I have some age-old apologies to make. Up close, in person, and from the heart.
