It cost a pile of insurance money and some of my own dollars to repair the damage to the nose of my car. Just a slight “bump” against the car in front did an astonishing amount of damage in an instant. No one was hurt. The other couple in the car I hit were gracious and accommodating. The repair has been effortless, except for my coughing up the $500 deductible. Ouch! But the accident caused me to reflect a bit.

My colleague and friend, California consultant James Newton of Newton Learning has a way of asking a hard question during discussions of difficulty and hardship. “How’d you set that up?”, he’ll say. What he means is “What were all the contextual elements, how were you involved and what was your part in bringing about this constellation of events that has led to your pain and downfall?” He’s pointing out our lives are ours, That our reality is so often very much our own making and we don’t see it clearly. It’s like we don’t want to see it. Or we’re afraid to look at our part. We blame others. We blame the universe. We blame God. “How’d you set that up?” Tough question. You mean it might not have been just an accident? Here’s a funny fantasy: I imagine myself standing on that street curb, people honking, my car a mess, cell phone in hand. I then imagine a beautiful Porche slowing down right beside where I stand. It’s James Newton driving by slowly, casually looking over, leaning out his window and asking in his inimitable, playful Buddha way: “How’d you set that up?”

Yes, it’s possible that we might assign part of this to “accident”, or simply unintentional. We don’t control everything. Harold Kushner created a mighty work in his book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”. He says don’t blame God. He would say God didn’t cause the damage to my car because I was being a bad person that day. His point is that we mustn’t imagine God as a bad parent, kind and generous when the going’s rough and punitive and hostile when we’ve erred. I like Kushner’s invitation to look to God for strength and inspiration during times of crisis. I also like James Newton’s encouragement to look inside ourselves, to see clearly our part in the struggle we encounter. How DID I set that up? I’m usually a careful driver. I wasn’t that day. I was in a crappy mood. I was way over-tired. And hungry. It was at the end of a too-long day in which a number of events that were emotionally charged had left me feeling distracted. I had the “blues”. My thinking was foggy and I was not present. I was somewhere else (staring at my phone?) and the reality of universe around me was slow moving, stop and go traffic. Buddhist monk and author Pema Chodron, in her book “Taking the Leap”, mentions our tendency as a species to judge ourselves harshly when we mess up. We focus on our failure and beat ourselves up. She asks that we might not just as easily focus on the fact that our “wisdom self” is actually doing the “noticing” that we are aware of our failure. An instinct toward improvement and grace. To gently recognize a part of ourselves that compassionately seeks to keep growing. She reminds us that what we focus on determines what we miss.

Namaste,
John