Bravo! Wish I'd said that!
I'd add something I gleaned from reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence many years ago:
QuoteI might have thought this was just a peculiar attitude of theirs about motorcycles but discovered later that it extended to other things -- Waiting for them to get going one morning in their kitchen I noticed the sink faucet was dripping and remembered that it was dripping the last time I was there before and that in fact it had been dripping as long as I could remember. I commented on it and John said he had tried to fix it with a new faucet washer but it hadn't worked. That was all he said. The presumption left was that that was the end of the matter. If you try to fix a faucet and your fixing doesn't work then it's just your lot to live with a dripping faucet.
This made me wonder to myself if it got on their nerves, this drip-drip-drip, week in, week out, year in, year out, but I could not notice any irritation or concern about it on their part, and so concluded they just aren't bothered by things like dripping faucets. Some people aren't.
What it was that changed this conclusion, I don't remember -- some intuition, some insight one day, perhaps it was a subtle change in Sylvia's mood whenever the dripping was particularly loud and she was trying to talk. She has a very soft voice. And one day when she was trying to talk above the dripping and the kids came in and interrupted her she lost her temper at them. It seemed that her anger at the kids would not have been nearly as great if the faucet hadn't also been dripping when she was trying to talk. It was the combined dripping and loud kids that blew her up. What struck me hard then was that she was not blaming the faucet, and that she was deliberately not blaming the faucet. She wasn't ignoring that faucet at all! She was suppressing anger at that faucet and that goddamned dripping faucet was just about killing her! But she could not admit the importance of this for some reason.
Why suppress anger at a dripping faucet? I wondered.
Any bells going off? When you were in denial, did you suppress anger at your true nature? Did you project your anger onto other things and other people?
Sorry for the big, long quote. But I wanted to make sure you had all the context.
I've found this book a constant inspiration. The whole thing is available online, for free!:
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/Karen
