Baby

 When things are difficult for me, I can tend to get down on myself. I blame myself wholly for my predicament, thinking that I was completely and utterly responsible for it. As this happens, I try to remember what the 13th century Japanese monk Dogen counseled: treat yourself as you would a baby. By this he certainly didn't mean to infantilize yourself and act childish. Instead, he was suggesting we treat ourselves with tenderness, affection, and understanding. We don't judge babies. We respond to them according to the needs of the moment. Ideally, we always do that with tenderness, affection, and understanding.

I need to remind myself of this because I, like a lot of people, assume I have more control over my life than I do. I judge and blame myself for feelings and actions that stem from circumstances I never formed. For instance, I could have anxious feelings because of my biology and genetics, my personal history, current events, and even my relation to the natural world. Can I do something about these anxious feelings? Of course. There are numerous tools I can choose to use to help myself out. I could splash cold water on my face, do relaxation exercises, practice slow breathing, and so on. 

So I do have some control. But judging myself for feeling anxious is counterproductive: It would be like judging a baby for crying. All it would do is make the baby cry more. Instead, we pick up a crying baby and bounce it gently and coo to it. Perhaps we feed it. The point is that we care for it. Sometimes, I have a hard time noticing how I need to care for myself. This is when Dogen's suggestion comes in handy.

What would it look like to treat myself with tenderness and affection? It would mean seeing myself as someone doing his best. While I certainly don't control the vast majority of what makes up my life, I do control enough to make a difference. I need to see myself as using my limited abilities to make my world, and the world of others, as joyful as I can. I do believe that I want the best for other people. I only feel actual ill will toward one person that I know of, and I am working on that.

In a strange way, it's to see that, from a certain perspective, I am perfect the way I am. By this I don't mean I have no faults or foibles; I have plenty of those. Rather, I have been mostly formed by forces and tendencies and histories well outside my responsibility. And this is good. This is what ties me intimately to other people, my community, my society, and nature. Like every being and thing, I am a whole panoply of tendencies from outside blossoming into this moment. In many ways, this moment couldn't be otherwise. So if I feel anxious, it's because many things came together in this moment to make me anxious. My anxiety is, in a sense, a song to all these complexities. My anxiety expresses all that has composed it.

That doesn't make it any less unpleasant. But it helps to see it as coming from all the myriad beings, things, and forms that have come together to make me in that moment. Seen this way, perhaps I can allow it to move through me, rather than fighting it. This is to treat myself like a baby: to respond to the unpleasantness of anxiety with affection and understanding for myself and the multitudes that go into making me in any moment.