Each Smallest Measure of Time

I'm wrestling with so much complexity as I sit to write this post about non-judgment. I'm judging a lot of things, including myself across my lifetime. Something recent comes to mind: after my father passed away in 2019, I sat down to write about him and found that for every loving and tender thing I could say about him, there was an opposing view I could share. Both views felt true, one perspective was harsh while the other was generous. Here’s an uncomfortable truth: I grew up judged and judging others. Oddly, I think this is a survival mechanism, that ultimately or maybe immediately erodes our wellbeing.

My memories of childhood are scarce and almost always tied to photographs. Sometimes to stories people have shared with me. Actual memories are just not there, with a few exceptions. Second grade is one of them. And it's just the right year of being me to share with you. It’s the year I was seven and it’s filled with shame, struggle, witnessing, and the elaborate ritual of my first holy communion.

It was the year I learned I had some talent with art and creativity. It was also the year I learned I was stupid.

The very tall Miss Short was my second grade teacher. She wore dark green velvet pants with slipper shoes and a silk headband. I was smitten with Miss Short and I can still see and feel her classroom at Memorial School, where kindergarten through third grade was taught. I was having a hard time learning to read, sit still, and be quiet. One day she asked me to read aloud. When I couldn't do it she snapped in a loud-whisper-hiss that I was stupid. Mrs. Davis, a parent helper in the classroom, heard her. And told my mother.

Oh my god. The stink my mother Rose made with the principal, Mr Devlin. She politely raised hell, I know this because I was there. These memories are mine, not from photographs or other people's stories. My mother's polite hell-raising got us absolutely nowhere. I remained in the very tall Miss Short's class, and she didn't adjust her attitude one little bit.

It was an enlightening experience, if for no other reason than to see my mother's anger on full display in the face of authority that, at the time, seemed to hold all the cards and power. Not all the Uno cards, mind you. A royal flush.

Another memory from that year was my sister's first communion and the classes I was taking to prepare for my first holy communion. There is a photo at the top of this post, I'm the one in the long light blue dress, holding the hands of a neighborhood friends. I wore that dress to my second grade class picture with a pair of pattent leather platform sandals. Yes I did. I had some questions for my CCD teacher. And permission, from my mother's example, to ask them out loud. Questions like “What about the women?”and what their role was and what did they contribute. The answer was resounding: don't ask questions, just do as you are told.

My outside smiled, or more likely pouted, and went back to saying the ‘Our Father’.

On the inside, my very first F-U was building.

That poor girl started looking out the window at the birds in the trees during class. She checked out of polite society almost by default. She found an entire universe in her mind and learned to express and create that world with art. But art was an escape from the pain and the difficulty of learning in a classroom where it was my “fault” I didn’t understand. And so pain and presence were on one side. Art and pretend on the other. Two things that were never allowed to be in the same room.

Until a dharma talk in 2006 at a Zen centre in Sunnyvale, where a monk said something so simple it woke me from the trance just enough to start questioning my assumptions.

Every smallest measure of time is an opportunity to change.

Not someday. Not when you've figured it out. Not when the verdict on you has finally been overturned. Now. This moment. The next one. Each one a door. Think, stop. Think, question.

What my 7-year-old believed about herself. That was what could change and transform what my today self thought about herself.

It landed in my body fully, right there in that room. The integration is still happening today. Which is why I began this post with the confession that I’m judging myself across my lifetime, all the way back to 1975. That year landed in my nervous system like a fully published owner’s manual. From time to time, I still need to go back and edit it for truth.

What's in your owner's manual that might be ready for an edit?