You Threw It Away!

Just last Thursday I composed a very important email, one I had been avoiding writing for about six months. I finally finished writing it though, only to click Send and watch it disappear behind a little error message informing me that the server was unreachable and that I should check my account settings. My heart stamped its foot, crossed its arteries and stood akimbo with a scrunched up look on its face. That’s what it felt like anyway. I sank into my seat, scrambling to find some way to recover that email I’d just spent three hours perfecting through my aversion, but I knew it was totally gone. I’d lost it and I felt horrible. I lost the email, right?

As my thoughts wandered back to that incorrigible email this past weekend, I remembered how my parents would react whenever they found that either my sister or I had lost something—“You threw it away!” they’d always state emphatically, perhaps with some expletives on my father’s part. “No I didn’t! It wasn’t on purpose,” I’d often retort, feeling even worse because they didn’t believe me, my young ego blaring out its verbal shield.

Now looking at things through the lens of my Buddhist mindfulness practices, perhaps there was some wisdom in my parents’ judgment. Having pretty much dropped the stupid-failure feeling over the weekend, I began to wonder what my ego was protecting by insisting that I’d lost the email, instead of allowing or accepting the idea that maybe, I had thrown it away. At first the thought came, but I am taking responsibility because I’m admitting that ‘I’ lost the email instead of blaming my iPod or the (sometimes incompetent) email platform it has for losing it. Even so, what if I try on this idea that I threw the email away, loosely employing The Work of Byron Katie technique? Of course when I tried it on, at first I felt weird and thought, why in the world would I throw away such an important email that I’d practically spent the whole day on? Then some answers to that question arose: ~I still really didn’t want to write that email ~I didn’t want to receive any feedback on it after sending it ~I wished I didn’t have to write it because sharing what needed to be put in it makes me feel vulnerable and needy and irresponsible ~I drafted the email on my iPod knowing all along that it had a tendency to evaporate missives in the sending process ~I got so excited about finally being done with the email that I didn’t save it anywhere else or in another format…

Interestingly, in trying the throw-away idea on and receiving those answers, I noticed all the defensive, judging, horrified feelings I’d had about the situation had flat-lined. Maybe I did throw that email away. I’m willing to take responsibility for having done that.

Perhaps the truth was that on some level, more unconscious than consciously, I had thrown the email away. So in taking complete responsibility for it, even though I never knowingly intended to thwart my efforts, I had provided myself the all-inclusive space to make total peace with the situation. Is this an example of what Shambhalians term ‘radical responsibility’? I plan on finding out for my birthday during Acharya Fleet Maull’s Radical Responsibility & Awakened Leadership weekend course in Washington, DC this March. Just maybe, if I keep taking complete & total responsibility for my actions in this more open way, I won’t feel so irresponsible for having put myself in a situation where I have to write this email.

by Eriall Steiner