Welcome, dear readers, to another month of taking metta off the meditation cushion and out into the world.
Last month’s article, Metta’s Sanity Checks, explored walking away from other people’s storms. This month found me staying as a long-term server at a relatively new Vipassana center that was still finding its feet.
For any readers unfamiliar with serving at a Vipassana center, for every task there are as many different ways to skin an onion as there are volunteers.
Back when I used to facilitate creative writing workshops, one of the classic books to recommend budding writers was Exercises in Style by French novelist, poet, critic, and editor Raymond Queneau. First published in 1947, it tells the story of a man seeing the same stranger twice in one day . . . in 99 different ways! In 2005, graphic artist Matt Madden published a fun visual reboot entitled 99 Ways to Tell a Story. Between them, they provided the perfect demonstration that the secret ingredient to good storytelling is in the telling rather than the story.
In the past month, I have found the same principle applies to giving service.
At the time of writing, I have supported three 10-day courses back-to-back in the center’s kitchen, with its fortnightly tidal pattern of the number of meals it prepares. When a 10-day course is in full-swing, the magic number is 125 mouths to feed. Gearing up or down between courses, that number can shrink to less than a dozen.
Some volunteers arrive to serve for the first time, while others have been doing so for decades. Some work in professional kitchens, while others feel overwhelmed by the kitchen’s catering-sized equipment and ingredients. Some are fluent in English, while others are still learning. Some are in a peaceful place in their everyday lives, while others come to find peace.
For any readers who have sat or served in more than one 10-day course, you will have experienced for yourself that no two are alike, considering that the course structure is identical at centers around the world and that the course teaching unchanging thanks to S. N. Goenka’s pre-recorded discourses.
As a meditator, writer, and enthusiastic cook and baker, what has fascinated me most so far is handing a completely different group of servers, characters, and chefs with the same instructions, script, and recipes every two weeks, and then watching the kitchen’s story unfold in 99 different ways.
Some days are pure comedy, while others run the gamut from tantrums to tears and everything in between. As a long-term center server now, my personal focus is on serving the servers rather than the students because I have found that if the servers’ basic needs feel met, they’ll be in better shape to meet the needs of the students.
This can be practical, such as offering someone a hot-water bottle on a summer-turning-to-autumn evening or when toughing out menstrual cramps. Or it can be emotional, such as sharing funny stories of previous mishaps far worse than whatever one they may be beating themselves up for.
While I could easily dish up 99 examples from the last month, I’ll offer three “courses” from metta’s menu that can serve anyone anywhere.
The first course on metta’s menu is accepting “good enough” over perfection.
Whenever I see a new server overthinking a simple veg-prep task or trying to follow a recipe to the absolute letter, I will remind them with a smile and an offer of help that, ultimately, the next meal simply needs to be edible and on time. Rather than telling them to take a breath or be kinder to themselves, which can easily come across as judgement in a stressful moment, I resort to storytelling and let them connect their own dots.
One of my favorite tales is when I was agonizing over a final-year degree project just days before the deadline, as if my life depended on it. My supervisor, a well-respected contributor in his specialist field, kindly sat me down behind closed doors to reassure me that the project only needed to be good enough to pave the way for my next academic step, rather than the be-all and end-all of academic papers. He confided about taping a US$20 bill to the first page of the library copy of his own PhD thesis, only to find it still there every time he had checked over the last 30 years!
The second course on metta’s menu is giving everyone—including oneself—the benefit of the doubt.
Something that appeals to me about the 10-day courses are that they really are open to anyone willing to learn and stick it out—and the same goes for serving. For this same reason, however, the daily 5.30 a.m.–8 p.m. pressure and grind of providing three meals a day for 125 can soon spiral out into projections and assumptions of all sorts among strangers.
For example, one nominated kitchen manager was still seemingly only washing dishes on day two. Observing this, I thought that perhaps they were naturally shy and decided to give them the space to find their own leadership style. A dining hall attendant lost patience with what they interpreted as a reluctance to step up to manage the team by accusing them of hiding behind the easiest job in the kitchen.
This soon escalated to the point that I worried that punches might be thrown, and I simply let both have their say. It turned out that the dining hall attendant was struggling with autism, and the kitchen manager with military-service PTSD. As there was no time to sit them both down to resolve the conflict, the easiest and most compassionate solution in the moment was to reassign the dining hall attendant to housekeeping with its more routine tasks than the unpredictability of the dining room and kitchen. The following day, of their own accord, the kitchen manager trained a new arrival to wash dishes and started circulating to manage the team.
And the third course on metta’s menu is making time and space whenever and wherever possible.
Bringing together a dozen or so strangers of different nationalities, abilities, and experiences is always a gamble. Another tale I like to tell anyone struggling with tricky team dynamics is how tumble stones are made: rather than processing each raw crystal or mineral separately, the stone are loaded together with dozens of others, along with some grit and water, into the rock equivalent of a washing machine until—days or even weeks later—all their rough edges come out smooth, rounded, and polished.
One afternoon, I noticed that a server, who was also a management consultant, standing back from the fray shaking their head in disbelief. Anticipating having to diffuse another misunderstanding, I gently asked if everything was okay before intervening.
They laughed and assured me everything was more than fine: according to all their management theories, our kitchen team should not work, yet here we all were collaborating more smoothly than any business for which he had ever consulted. A longer discussion followed, and we agreed that—as frustrating as dropping everything mid-task to attend the three daily group sits could sometimes feel, and discovering how much we all reeked of onions upon entering the Dhamma hall—those pauses that stopped and separated the team were also ultimately the secret ingredient that brought us back together in a new way and refreshed each time.
On a recent day off, I waited until the morning group sit began before sneaking into the kitchen for a quiet solo breakfast. While there, I bumped into a fellow long-term server attempting the same! We laughed at each our mutual stealth tactics to paradoxically seek out peace and quiet in a silent meditation retreat center, and sat down to eat together in the break-room for female servers.
Encouraging her to practice her English, I asked how she was enjoying her stay. Not for a minute did I expect to receive a simple answer to the same seemingly complex question that had been on my own mind for the past two years while volunteering on organic farms: about service-to-self versus service-to-others, and how I had somehow found myself washed up on the shores of a Vipassana center again.
She described several voluntary placements similar to my own mixed experiences, and confided how disheartening it could be to find her fellow volunteers were only looking for . . . she raised her hands into a triangle above her head to indicate free accommodation . . . rather than . . . she lowered her hands to her heart and radiating them out to indicate generating metta.
And so, dear readers, whatever life may be dishing up for you now, please remember these three courses from metta’s menu: accept “good enough” over perfection; give everyone—including yourself—the benefit of the doubt; and make time and space whenever and wherever possible . . . in 99 different ways.
Or, to metta-morphose the unlikely hit “The Onion Song” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell:
Whether they’re rich or poor
We don’t care what you do
How you look, or your status claim, baby
No no, because brothers and sisters
From now on, is gonna be everyone’s nameThe world is just a great big onion
And pain and fear are the spices that make you cry
Yes it is, oh, baby
And the only way to get rid of this great big onion
Is to plant metta seeds
Related features from BDG
Once Upon a Time – Storytelling as a Means of Healing and Social Reconnection
The Art of Interrupting
Book Review: Summoned by the Earth: Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing Our World
From Traditional Roots to Modern Mindfulness: The Movement of Vipassana Meditation in the 20th Century
Praise for a Hopepunk Psalm
