Sometimes nothing is a wholebunchalotta. Even the ego can use this handy tool.
Lemme 'splain 'bout silence. As the three folks here who read my posts know, I've been quasi-bitchin' about the worst winter in Madison, WI history and the many Sisyphean challenges I've contended with, namely, shoveling the walks. My neighbors are the working elite who have nice cushy jobs but have to produce: lawyers, psychiatrists, computer geeks, small business owners, like that. Well, you'd think that responsible bunch would shovel their walks, eh? You'd be wrong about 70% of the time. Oh, but it gets worse. I've shoveled maybe 40 times to their average of about 6 times -- one neighbor is almost as good a citizen as me, but one has NEVER done his walks EVER....and, yep, that guy lives right next door to me. (He's a bigtime bicycle rider, so he's got the muscles, but nope.) So guess what? At the beginning of winter here, late in the evening, the snow was coming down thick. I thought, "Well, I'll at least clear a pathway, one shovel wide, now, and then do the whole walk tomorrow." So I did that. Then the ice began to fall, and the pathway I had cleared got two inches of ice adhering to the concrete while everyone else merely got a crust on the top of their eight inches of snow and could easily deal with it. Not my ice -- had to be pick-axed off, and I didn't have a pick axe. So, next day, I went to the hardware store, bought a nice ice chipper, came home and thoroughly exhausted myself before I realized that my ice chipper was more like a kiddie pretend tool, and by that time, tired, sweaty and after sundown, I called it a day with most of the walks still covered -- just as most of my neighbors' were. Well, the next day, I get a $109 ticket for not having my walk COMPLETELY cleared. Why? -- cuz my neighbor who never does his walk had been complained about -- rightfully -- by another neighbor, and when the city inspector came out, she looked at the house in question and then to each house on either side of the offender. So I got a ticket too. Okay, my bad, and, well, he got a ticket too. I'll live, but I called the city and asked about why the neighbors across the street didn't get ticketed and was told that that was the sunny side of the street and those walks would melt "soon enough." Well, you can't fight city hall, but you can fight the neighbors -- with silence. So what I did was buy a primo ice chipper -- 30 pounder -- and I cleaned my walks and driveway spotlessly from edge of lawn to edge of lawn, and I cleared off the snow from the lawn around the fire hydrant too, and I cleared the wheelchair access ramps and then out to half way into the street to boot. Oh, my sidewalks were silent then! Nary a flake to cry out about my lazy-ass not caring about how the neighborhood looks. So I kept it up and haven't faltered for the whole winter while every single neighbor pretty much fucked up right and left so much that people walked their dogs in the street rather than on the walks. Now, here's the good part: no one's gotten a ticket since I got mine. See? See? They KNOW I could have reported them a dozen times each, but SILENT DOOR KNOBS WITH NO TICKETS is all that they have as a complaint from me. My first payoff: the other day, a neighbor from across the street down the block a bit yelled out to me: "Nice walks, and you did your lawn nice last summer too!" I've never met the guy and that's the first thing he said to me. He couldn't contain himself -- had to make a psychic partial payment to lessen his great debt to me for having saved him literally a thousand dollars worth of fines. Ah, buttah to the ego. Now, consider the concepts of pay it forwards, living not for the fruits of action, doing the right thing, Secret Santa's, and good citizenship. Aren't all of them heavily involved with silence being the best part of those giftings to the world? Isn't even egoic silence sweet no matter if it's done "for personal aggrandizement?" And doesn't it burn the soul to have someone doing something you should have done first? Writhe neighbors writhe under the coals I've heaped upon your heads!!! False pride aside, Ramana Maharishi assures us all that true silence is infinitely more powerful than mere egoic lip-zipping. So, in honor of that, to be like my praising neighbor and to erase some of the karma of false pride, I spent 30 minutes chipping my neighbor's walk today -- big storm coming tonight, and it will be impossible to shovel any snow that's laying on frozen slush with three inch deep frozen footprints like Rex tracks in fossil mud. And then I got out of there before my neighbor came home. Sidewalk Secret Santa R me! Ah....it's good to be smug and tiny minded. Edg
