Non-resistance

This morning I was waiting in line outside a government office that opens at 9 a.m. The handful of other people who were also standing there at 8:30 a.m. probably knew, as did I, that this was the way to get at the head of the line, which can grow exponentially by 9 o’clock.

The 50ish guy in front of me seemed harmless. In his good old boy southern accent, he turned to me and the folks behind me and commented on how a few more warm days like this one in early March and the still-brown grass would “come on like crazy”. Talking about the oncoming spring felt very comfortable to me.

Then, from some connection known only to the speaker, he shifted to how much colder the winters used to be, how he had to walk through the snow to get to school because “they didn’t cancel school like they do today”. Pretty classic – almost archetypal – stuff about “When I was a kid” (“When I was your age”, etc.). I started then to only half-listen, because these stories can get a bit tedious.

Then another shift in the trajectory of this guy’s (so far unencouraged) soliloquy, which I had not predicted: “They used to give us whippin’s, too. If you got out of line, that paddle came out. Nowadays, if you even look at ‘em wrong, they sue you…. And then they wonder why kids come into school shooting people.” I felt the tension start to build in my body.

“They believed in the Ten Commandments back then. Now they’re getting rid of those, too.”

“Now that’s the real problem.” This last had obviously hit a nerve for the 70ish lady behind me. Now I was no longer just face-to-face with this guy who held beliefs very different from my own – and who, as he warmed to the task, was expressing them with a growing level of belligerency. Now I was trapped in the middle of some reactionary call-and-response, with no place to go unless I wanted to give up my place in the line.

Before things “got all pear-shaped” (I loved that expression from a Brit colleague I had worked with a few years before, to describe a situation that had suddenly become problematic), I had been feeling kind of nice and relaxed, if maybe not fully awake yet - no time for coffee before heading to this office.

I had even, as I stood in line, been practicing the “body awareness” exercise I describe in another post. Noticing my breathing and the various sensations in my body, I had even been a little bit peaceful.

But not now. The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. I had an impulse to say something, to not let all this oppressive (by my standards) shit just sit. “Speak up for yourself.” I was right in the middle – in the middle – of the kind of attitudes that I hate about living in the South.

Then I heard a little whisper from somewhere in me, just ever-so-lightly inserting itself whenever my angry protestations took a moment to breathe:

“What if you didn’t resist this?”

I knew immediately to what this inner voice was referring. It was reminding me of a principle in which I deeply believe and occasionally even practice – if not at all in this particular moment.

What if I were to remember – and even feel in my body – that nothing was going wrong here? What if I did not shift from peace to alarm bells, based simply on some stuff people said – which was not in any way aimed at me, but I just happened to be standing in the middle of? Sure, getting accidentally in the middle of a drive-by shooting would be very bad – but these were words, for Pete’s sake. Maybe kind of angry, negative words. Maybe words with which I strongly disagree, but still just words.

I started in that last sentence to say, “with which I violently disagree”. Ah, here is a lead for me; here is something I can work with. The problem here was really not in any of the words I was hearing, but rather some violence within me – the part of me that feels it needs to “fight back”.

What if I did not need to fight back?

What if I reassured myself that, in the here and now, no one was in any danger? There weren’t any kids about to be paddled, etc.

There was no way for me to change anybody’s mind – and really no need to. In this moment, it really did not make any difference what these people thought and believed.


There are so many stimuli around me that I have the impulse to resist. A little later in the morning, I saw a guy walk by who was way overweight. Something in me tensed up from just watching him. I didn’t want to be seeing this. But why? I’m not him, carrying around all that extra weight. I have no idea what it is like for him to be so heavy – for all I know, it does not bother him at all. But it bothered me.

How many other things do I see, hear, read, etc., in the course of a day that lead me to tighten inside? I started in that sentence to say, “make me tighten”. But these stimuli obviously don’t make me tighten – they don’t make me do anything. It’s me that does it.

I think it’s safe to say that at least some of my tightness is an expression of disapproval. I don’t approve of what these people say, of how heavy that guy is, etc. But whether I approve or not is certainly not going to make any difference in what I see, now is it? My approval or lack of it has no impact on anything in the outside world, unless I feel compelled to mess with it – which will almost certainly just create more mess. No, my disapproval affects nothing out there – only in here. I get tense when I disapprove of some part of my world. I may get irritated, self-righteous, angry, defensive – all manner of lesser or greater discomfort. I make myself unhappy.

It obviously doesn’t have to go that way. It would be totally possible to remind myself of something else I deeply believe, no matter how often I forget it: nothing is going wrong. It is all as it is meant to be. There is a wisdom operating here that’s a lot smarter than my little mind. I don’t have to be the traffic cop or babysitter for how other people, think, feel, or speak. I don’t need in any way to get in the middle of how much or badly they eat, whether they work out, etc., etc., etc.

No, if I let go of patrolling the rest of the world, but just walk my own beat, that’s really plenty to keep my hands full. And, when I’m lucky, I will apply some of these same insights to what I see, hear, feel inside of me. I don’t have to disapprove of any of it, try to change it – I don’t have to go on alarm at all. Trying to mess with what I find in myself will most likely be as little effective as if I had waded into the reactionary deep water on line in front of that office this morning.

I’ve really got better things to do, like noticing my breathing.