PONDERING MY LIFE (2)

Happy Solstice everyone. This is the moment at the top of the roller coaster of the year, when the day is longest and the night shortest (in the Northern Hemisphere). From now on, it will be progressively harder to wake and get up at 5 am; it will get darker gradually until December, the Winter Solstice, when it will be dark at 6 am. whereas now it is full daylight by 4:30. And so it goes on.

I had a dream a few years ago of people coming to my house to collect writings that I had done (the word that stuck in my head was incunabula) and the year was 2038. I thought that that would be the year of my death, and I would be 83 years old (the mirror image of the last two digits of the date, so it made sense). It is now only 13 years till that date. Who knows if my dream will be accurate?

If I am only 13 years till my death, there seem to be many things I haven’t learned yet from being human and a material object in this lifetime. I’d better get a move on!

Last time (Part 1) I was pondering one meaning of anger in myself, and discovering that it masked some deep sadness – the sadness of not being good enough. I know that I am supposed to do, say, and care the same as “other people” but in this lifetime, my personality is such that I can’t feel what I am “supposed” to feel. The love and caring that other people seem to give and take freely are difficult for me, and that means I find it hard to take them in when they come my way. Or possibly people talk so much about it for the very reason that it is so hard to find? Or is this whole issue part of “niceness” as a social imerative?

This time (Part 2) I want to explore sincerity or truth and how it is handled in the two cultures I have experienced. What is the intention of these niceties, for the giver and for the receiver?

 I am reminded of the many times I was complimented after playing the horn in concerts. I always pushed the compliments away because I knew, as those people apparently didn’t, all the small reasons my performance didn’t “deserve” compliments. If I was complimented, it simply meant that those people weren’t aware of my undeservingness. I became, gradually, “compliment-deaf” (something like tone-deaf). I had to be told and taught how to take in compliments, how to answer with thanks rather than with a blow-by-blow description of how bad my performance had really been.

This is exacerbated (lovely word!) in Japan because it’s so common for foreigners to be lavishly (publicly) complimented for every little thing e.g. “You hold chopsticks so well” or “Your Japanese is so good” or my all-time non-favorite, “You are more Japanese than the Japanese”. I know, none better, that my “performance” is not right in so many little ways. (Why am I bothering to do things that make people compliment me anyway? That is a thorny problem, and probably too big for this blog.) The compliments are actually meant to make the giver feel better about their contribution to societal smoothness, and is not much about the receiver at all. That is a shocking realization, and it isn’t just limited to Japan. Most cultures reward “niceness” (social acceptability) over truth.

I became suspicious of this kind of “niceness” early in my school days in the US, when I learned from my peers that I was expected to disparage my own effort and lavishly praise others (“Oh, mine’s not good. Yours is so good”, etc.). Instead of making me learn how to do this as a social skill, it struck me as shameful manipulation. Every girl in the group disparaged their own efforts, in hope of being praised in turn. That was the real psychic payoff. When I grew up with these kinds of compliments constantly in my ears, the result was distrust.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered, on coming to Japan and feeling my way a bit into the culture, that this kind of thing was, in fact, an accepted social mechanism. You must disparage anything that you regard as “yours” as a matter of course, and praise others’ things to the skies. Polite speech isn’t expected to be “sincere”, it’s what we in the west would call, disparagingly, “mouthing platitudes”; honesty, universally imagined to be brutal and hurtful, is reserved for expression in private situations. Welcome to the wonderful world of “tatemae” (socially acceptable, public speech or behavior) and “honne” (true feelings, only to be expressed in private). These are variously adopted all over Japan, more in some places than others.

The tatemae version: “Oh, you’ve lost weight, isn’t that marvellous!” The “honne” version (later, delivered in a whisper to cronies or relatives): “I can’t believe how fat she has gotten.” Which is the “truth”? Both? Neither? Is sincerity just a chimera? Never to be experienced because it’s just too dangerous for society? I think that this social mechanism has its own inherent danger that one will adopt the tatemae version of reality, because it’s easier and everyone else adopts it, and reject the honne version as too much work. Or at least not think about it.  

Truth, or sincerity as a way of expressing one’s own version of truth, in this society where I live, as well as throughout the world in civilized society, are by their very nature abrasive and to be covered over with niceness, platitudes, or kimari-monku (set phrases) as they are known in Japan. This is a way that the Japanese seek harmony, which, as I explored in a talk long ago, is at the center of the Japanese heart and is always to be sought as an ideal. Not truth – harmony. Does this ideal actively repress individuality? That is another thorny issue, and one that many people have expressed an opinion about.

I presume this means harmony that is created with others in one’s group. But I don’t belong to the group around me. What I do, including my individual “truth”, doesn’t contribute to harmony, and thus is pushed aside. No one thinks about it, at least they don’t seem to. So where does one go in this place to have one’s truth accepted?

My anger is thus a way of handling the sadness of loneliness, of being misunderstood, when what I want is to express my own truth and have that be OK. I have never experienced this, in Japan or anywhere else. Maybe it’s within myself that it isn’t OK, and outside myself everyone is accepting it as best they can. This is one of the things I can’t feel in this lifetime.

Is it enough just to feel and honor one’s own truth and not to seek validation from others? But that sounds overly lonely, or overly superior. I am reminded of the words of Pema Chodron, “Most people just want to be agreed with.” Where can I find this? Maybe it doesn’t matter. What do you think?