I’m in awe of the creative things people can do: writing goosebump-inducing literary prose, shaping the most exquisite objects with their bare hands, or conversing with their plants so lovingly and knowledgeably that the plants respond with the most beautiful flowers and juiciest fruits. Blessed they are. I’ve always felt creatively stunted when it comes to matters of art, craft, gardening, or the like. But I, too, have a gift.
I can take a fleeting thought and spin it into a full-blown storyline, packed with intrigue, action, and loads of drama. Spiders would envy the speed at which I weave these narratives into almost-believable webs of logic and reasoning.
I convince myself that I “know” why someone acted the way they did, why they said, or didn’t say, those words. I’m a body language expert, a psychic, and a Nostradamus all-in-one, capable of taking the slightest hints and extricating layers of buried meanings from them.
This ability to turn a molehill into a mountain is an art form, thankfully one I don’t know how to monetize; otherwise, Hollywood would be drowning in screenplays straight from my imagination.
It’s adorable when a little child plays with an imaginary friend, but when adults do it, it stops being a cute, creative outlet and starts looking suspiciously like good old neurosis.
Turns out, this habit of turning trivial thoughts into elaborate screenplays is borne from a fundamental human trait. We are supposed to connect the dots to keep us alive and safe. Some of us spend years honing this attribute and end up not just connecting dots but adding pebbles, rocks, and boulders until we conjure up mountains. Others, if you’re reading this and thinking, What on earth is she talking about?, are lucky to let the trait remain nascent. They see a dot for what it is. A dot.
The Buddhists call this tendency to magnify a passing thought into a strong emotion the Klesha Mara, one of the four Maras that Buddhism believes are the obstacles to the path to enlightenment.
Here’s spiritual guru Pema Chodron describing the Klesha Mara,
A simple feeling will arise, and instead of simply letting it be there, we panic. We begin to weave our thoughts into a storyline, which gives rise to bigger emotions. Instead of just sitting in some kind of openness with our uncomfortable feeling, we bring out the bellows and fan away at it…
When everything falls apart and we feel uncertainty, disappointment, shock, embarrassment, what’s left is a mind that is clear, unbiased, and fresh. But we don’t see that. Instead, we feel the queasiness and uncertainty of being in no-man’s-land and enlarge the feeling and march it down the street with banners that proclaim how bad everything is. We knock on every door asking people to sign petitions until there is a whole army of people who agree with us that everything is wrong.
In short, when plans don’t conform to our worldview, we fight our way and go to great lengths to cling to our version of the truth. The more threatening the situation feels, the tighter we grip and the more grandiose our storylines become.
Not sure about you, but this resonated with me deeply.
Every time I’m not in the driver’s seat, when people won’t listen to me, or plans go sideways, the animator in me rouses awake to complete the storyline. I am either voicing my opinions off, or catching the next unsuspecting caller and subjecting them to my monologue about why I’m right, or, like Pema Chodron, so articulately says, “ask them to sign a petition to agree that everything is wrong.”
I remember going to a mammogram a couple of years ago. I kept my eye on the technician, and when I saw a furrowed brow and noticed the pensiveness in her face, I was off to the races. In microseconds, I convinced myself she was seeing something suspicious, and that led me down the rabbit hole to reflexive rumination.
“Gosh, what am I going to do?”
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was a work assignment I detested, so there was relief! I might not have to do that after all. Phew! But then it got real.
“I’ll lose my hair!” And then followed the big-ticket items…
“Will my family be okay?”
“How do we break this to my mom?”
“Will I live to see my daughter get married?” And on, and on, and on…
Like a pressure cooker wound tight without a release valve, I kept spinning my doomsday tale until the tech walked over, a forced smile on her face. “The doctor said there are no concerns. You’ll get the official report in a couple of days. We’ll see you in three years.”
Maybe the tech looked peeved because her mother-in-law had called earlier to say she couldn’t pick up her grandchild from school as planned because the only appointment the busy nail salon had was at 3 p.m. Maybe. Or, maybe the tech had a run-in with an annoying co-worker just before I walked in. Maybe. (For some reason, these versions of the story only occurred to me as I drove home.)
I know what you’re thinking...Your friend may be really mad with what you said, and so she doesn’t pick up her phone, or the company may really be going through a financial jam, and so you’re not getting the promotion you deserve, or that suspicious cyst may turn out to be cancer, after all. Shit happens.
But how is it helpful to turn every faint pencil line into the Great Wall of China? While positive psychology gurus and Western optimism in general will have us believe that it’s better to be Pollyanna and expect the best, the Buddhists suggest a much more even-keeled approach to living life. Their suggestion is to see things as they are, to neither turn left (worst-case scenarios) nor right (paint rosy alternatives), to avoid the feeling of discomfort.
The Buddhist Middle Way is to simply tune in to the present, to view the pencil line, the dot, the uncertainty, for what it is. Time will do the rest.
Pema Chodron refers to a mind that is “clear, unbiased, and fresh” when we feel uncertainty. We can try to lean in to that openness and vastness, and “embrace the goodness of life” instead of “using our emotions to regain our ground.”
No one says this will be easy to do, especially after years of conditioning, but knowing the Buddha himself had to contend with the Klesha Mara should give us hope.
When we wake up, we can live fully without seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, without re-creating ourselves when we fall apart. Pema Chodron