Other things I could have reacted to yesterday...
There was a speaker, someone I had had a complicated relation to in the past. I could have been irritated by some of her talk, or else jealous of it, since it turned out to be a good one. I was also nervous about my personal relation to her. But as I monitored my own reactions I became aware of all of it as it came up. I still felt these emotions, but they didn't have that kind of weight they might have had in the past for me.
My conversations with her afterwords were very normal, too. I asked a question that was not hostile or condescending, and we talked a bit.
Mindfulness doesn't kill the emotions, but just puts them in their proper place. Probably one of the most painful moments I had in the profession was when two of my colleagues decided to give an NEH seminar, in my own field, without including me. I just found out one day that it was happening and it felt like being punched in the gut. I still feel that this was not the best behavior on their part, and I still remember the emotion itself with a degree of vividness. The difference is that now I can also look at it with a degree of curiosity, examining my own reactions and learning something from them and not merely feeling the pain in all its rawness.
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