The Squeeze

If we want to communicate and we have a strong aspiration to help others-in terms of engaging in social action, helping our family or community, or just being there for people when they need us-then sooner or later we’re going to experience the big squeeze. Our ideals and the reality of what’s happening don’t match. We feel as if we’re between the fingers of a big giant who is squeezing us. We find ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

There is often a discrepancy between our ideals and what we actually encounter. For instance, in raising children, we have a lot of good ideas, but sometimes it’s challenging to put together the good ideas with how our children are, there at the breakfast table with food all over themselves. Or in meditation, have you noticed how difficult it is to feel emotions without getting totally swept away by them, or how difficult it is simply to cultivate friendliness toward yourself when you’re feeling miserable or panicked or all caught up?

There’s a discrepancy between our inspiration and the situation as it presents itself. It’s the rub between those two things-the squeeze between reality and vision-that causes us to grow up, to wake up to be 100 percent decent, alive, and compassionate. The big squeeze is one of the most productive places on the spiritual path and in particular on this journey of awakening the heart.

~ Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chodron

Last night, helping my middle child with homework left from our farm adventure last week, was a trial in how much compassion and patience I could muster.

We were both overtired. I’d subbed at her school yesterday during Earth Olympics. That’s the experiential and sustainable version of Field Day in other schools. We were outside all day, doing activities like fire-starting with a bowdrill, building a cob oven, throwing sticks at rabbit cones a la indigenous throwing stick style, purifying stream water, edible weed walking, and building natural art. I was a runner – escort service for children needing the nurse, toilet – or break relief for the teachers between groups. It was a fun day, and I was tired from hiking up and down steep hills all day.

My daughter was exhausted. She’d been at Earth Olympics, and then had a school dance that evening. We won’t even try to go into why a decision was made to allow the students to hold a dance on a Tuesday night on the evening after they’d been outside all day in extraordinary physical exercise.

And she was frustrated, because the farm scavenger hunt wasn’t finished, there were three other students in her group (one of whom had already left for the year to travel with her family, the only other student who works as hard as my daughter). And no one appeared to be helping with the last bits of the assignment. She was trying to accumulate the last pieces of information, including finding Latin names for all the produce grown by the CSG. She was beyond exhausted, in tears, and losing it big time.

I did manage to calm her down, gave her a 15-minute time limit to finish as many as she could before she had to go to bed. I reminded her that her team had probably completed more work than any other team there, and that she’d put an additional number of hours in on top of what her team accomplished that day. That it was her drawing in the final report, her poem in the final report, and that she would be handing in the project. The teacher would know who did all the extra work, and she would receive the credit.

She managed to get another half dozen Latin names in her 15 minutes, plus complete one essay answer on how invasive species change ecosystems (none of us had noticed that we hadn’t answered that question). And she went to bed and left me the most heartbreakingly beautiful thank you note, thanking me for my patience.

You can only imagine the cringing I was feeling inside, as I reflected on my lack of patience with her last night, how annoyed I was that she was taking this assignment too seriously. I was also annoyed with the lack of foresight in that school about giving assignments over a time with so many activities at the school, and no time during school to work as a group. I was annoyed that I had no chance to sit down and recover from a long exhausting day, as I carted both older children back and forth to the dance, ran to the supermarket to pick up chips because we’d forgotten to buy them on Sunday.

These were welcome words this morning, a reminder that I need to take the time to breathe through the difference between my ideal and my reality. That big squeeze that Chodron talks about is a daily reality in my life, and my challenge is to walk between my vision and reality, and find the compassion to continue to give to others, and help them find a peaceful way to live.

My dream is to enable my daughters to find that peaceful place inside themselves.