Meeting Expectations

Sunday the meditation group I’ve been attending had an impromptu meeting on revising how we give meditation instruction.

I can be impatient at meetings. I get frustrated because it often feels to me that people are far more generous with their opinions and ideas as to how things should be done than they are with the time and energy it would take to make those ideas a reality.

This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to the meditation group. The world seems filled with those who--whether the subject is the outside world or their inner lives--would choose talking about the mess for thirty minutes over cleaning for three. As a quieter person, I find it baffling, and yet enough people do it that I sometimes feel as though maybe I’m the crazy one.

That’s what I tell myself, anyways.

In this specific case, I’m also annoyed at the meditation group’s steadfast refusal to quit their jibber-jabber, read my mind, and then do what I want them to do the way I want them to do it.

This isn’t something I’m going to have to worry about much longer.

I’ve bought my bus ticket west; I’m leaving for the priory in just under a month. I’ve been helping with meditation instruction for six years, but the next session or the one after that will probably be my last.

Meanwhile, the group is going ahead and working out new ideas for doing instruction. Don’t they realize I’m going away? Haven’t they noticed that I’m feeling guilty about leaving and wondering how instruction is going to go without my being there to help? Here I am, renouncing the world to save all beings, moving to a cabin in the mountains to Not Have Sex and be eaten by mosquitoes and they’re just going to keep going on and be fine.

Unbelievable.

 Can you believe they’re abandoning me like that?