This essay,
The Second Arrow II,
is not the sequel to
The Second Arrow,
as the suffix "II"
ordinarily
implies. Rather it's that I liked its
ideas
so much so that I decided to write version II.
I was working on a massive
Cowboy Cottage
cleanup project, moving things from places where it didn't work for
them to be, to places where it made a lot more sense for them to be,
and at the same time discarding or marking for "Goodwill" things I no
longer needed. As I was lifting a heavy box over my head to put it in
its new place without having a good grip on it ... I hurt something in
my shoulder, uttering a few choice expletives deleteds asterisks as I
did so.
To be sure, over the next week or so, the physical discomfort eased.
And while it was easing and I had the opportunity to be
with the entire experience, I noticed that over some of the experience,
the physical discomfort, I couldn't do much except apply Deep
Heat. Yet much more of it was the associated (for want of a better
word)
conversational discomfort ie the things I was saying to
myself about the physical discomfort, the conversations
which were dubbed (if you will) over the physical
discomfort. And I noticed there was even more of them than there was of
the physical discomfort itself. In addition I noticed that what I was
saying to myself about the physical discomfort ie the conversational
discomfort's hana hana hana, wasn't doing me any good at all.
Really.
There was analysis ("How could it
happen?").
There was criticism
("Stoopid!
You should have positioned your body better."). There was blame ("It's
what you get for not letting things well enough alone."). There was
make-wrong ("It shouldn't have
happened.").
Soon something not-so-obvious-at-first began to dawn on me, which was:
if the entire experience could be represented as a pie-chart with ten
slices, only one of them was the physical discomfort. The
rest were the conversational over-dubs. It meant that the entire
experience comprised almost ten times more of the conversational
over-dubs about which I could do something, than of the physical
discomfort itself about which I could do nothing. In broad
terms, there was
what happened,
and there was
the story about
what happened.
To my surprise, it occurred to me that
what
happened
and the physical discomfort itself, were the very least of my concerns,
even though they shouted the very loudest for my
attention.
They only occupied one slice of the ten slice pie, even though they
were the most distracting.
In the
Buddhist
tome
Mindfulness
Meditation's
the Buddha's "Second
Arrow" parable,
there's
what happened
ie there's the actual physical incident, and the discomfort in my
shoulder. That was the first arrow, brought about by
what happened,
over which I have very little power. What followed after that, all the
conversational over-dubs, is the second arrow (or second
arrows - plural, actually): the analysis,
the criticism, the complaint, make-wrong etc. Over the
second arrow, I have a lot of power. So in actuality, the first arrow,
the incident itself, is really a small component of the total
experience I'm dealing with when I take the second arrow(s) into
account as well. It's the second arrow which takes an incident ie
any incident, and blows it out of all proportion.
