How to deal with difficult situations

Patient acceptance is the bread and butter of our daily peace and spiritual practice. With patience, we proactively apply the Buddhism or Dharma we know to everyone and everything we meet. Patience is a vast practice that draws on all of Buddha’s teachings, including karma, renunciation, compassion, and wisdom. It’s a catch-all state of mind that contains all the ways of looking at the world that both pre-empt difficulties and are the best response to difficulties.

For this reason, I think of patient acceptance as applied Buddhism. If we decide to rely upon patience as opposed to being blind-sided multiple times per day, we start to see everything we encounter as an actual opportunity to apply Dharma. Through this we can make steady progress toward our true goal of lasting happiness and freedom for, after all, there’s no shortage of opportunities these days. Or any days in samsara.

Talking of renunciation and compassion, do you believe in happily ever after? Watching TikTok videos of rescued factory farm animals, dancing families, or precocious infants (perhaps that’s just my newsfeed?!), I can be lulled into “Aww! They’re ok.” But heartwarming as this is, I have seen too much to hope that this relief from abuse or family strife will last forever – not even in this life, let alone in all our future lives. In samsara, things are designed to go wrong – this is not a glitch, it’s a feature.

I gave the metaphor of a New York sidewalk in this last article, How to deal with difficult people, when this woman walked out a doorway into my path … and she wasn’t stopping. Either I kept walking and she kept walking and we played chicken right up to the last moment and/or literally crashed into each other …. OR I needed to bob and weave and let her go.

Fundamental acceptance 

Unlike the deserted mountain trails of Colorado, where you only need avoid the occasional bear, navigating New York means slowing down due to congestion or speeding up to pass someone; and none of this is really under anyone’s control. In life, too, if I’m determined to keep going in a straight line at the pace of my choosing – because that is what I expect to be able to do, that is what I want, and that is what other people simply have to put up with – I’m going to have a lot of accidents. I’m going to be knocked over. I’m going to have a lot of bruises. I’m going to have people yelling at me. I’m going to tread in dog poo. It’s not going to be pleasant. Due to my unrealistic expectations that everything should go my way and that everyone should get out of my way, not to mention that there obviously shouldn’t be any mess anywhere, I’m going to become sorely disappointed, frustrated, and annoyed. By the time I get home, I’m going to feel I’ve had an horrible day. Unnecessarily, as it happens.

For on the other hand, if I understand the nature of New York’s sidewalks, there’s a fundamental acceptance that the moment I step out and start walking I’m going to have to be on the lookout and flexible, prepared to slow down, speed up, get out of the way, stop, pause, adapt etc. And that’s okay because I’ve signed up for that, as it were. That is just how it is and so I won’t get bent out of shape when the inevitable happens. (Another analogy would be safely and calmly navigating the rush-hour traffic to get home in pretty much any major city in the world).

The difference between these two approaches to sidewalks – and life – is acceptance. In samsara, as soon as we’re born we’re crying, as we’re once again caught up in not getting what we want, getting what we don’t want, discontent, sickness, ageing, and death … all followed by another painful birth. That’s just the way it is. If I accept that things may or may not go my way, and this is just the way it is so there’s no point pretending or wishing it was otherwise, then it’s not a real problem. I may still have a lot of outer obstacles, near collisions, and so on, but I won’t have the inner resistance and pain. I will be finding ways to transform the inevitable.

You may have noticed, being unhappy doesn’t change things, it just means we’re unhappy. I once heard Venerable Geshe Kelsang say:

Don’t be unhappy. There are enough unhappy people.

It is exhausting to live in perpetual fight mode, particularly in a battle you can never win. There’s no point fighting reality; it has already won. On the other hand, we can accept what’s already happening with a view to improving things as needed. We can change the future providing we accept what’s appearing, but we cannot change what we cannot first accept.

According to Buddhism, patience is a mind that is able to accept fully and happily whatever occurs. It is much more than just gritting our teeth and putting up with things. As we go through life, true patience is reliable strength and flexibility, accepting what is, keeping a smile in our heart. Patience is the other side of the coin from the wisdom realizing emptiness for it simply accepts karmic appearances as they arise, without wishing they were otherwise. Without it, I think it is impossible to keep a peaceful mind.

I find that when I do manage to accept difficult people and situations, there is automatically more bandwidth and optimism for making external changes as needed. Every day, of course, there are external problems that can and must be dealt with – like if the trash is piling up so high on the sidewalk that no one can walk anywhere anymore, maybe I put a call into the council. So it’s not that we don’t do anything external at all, but that there’s an underlying acceptance, “This is what’s going to happen if I walk down the street of life. I don’t know exactly what to expect, but I do know that I’m not likely able to go in a straight line.”

As for that one New Yorker friend who said when I shared this with him, “No, there is another way of doing things.” “Yeah? What’s that?” “Just act crazy and people will get out of your way.” I think he’s got a point, lol, but for how long would they get out of my way? He was joking, of course, but it is true that due to intimidating others or whatever, maybe we can get our own way for a while. I could have just barreled into that woman so that she’d learn her lesson. I could kick the dog. I could push the bicyclist out of the way. I could charge down the road yelling incoherently to give myself a wide berth. I could get people to vote me queen of the sidewalk and have a barrier of protection around me. However, I wouldn’t make many friends. I wouldn’t be very welcome. And it wouldn’t be very long before everyone got fed up with me and got rid of me somehow. Right?

The only real solution to moving peacefully down the sidewalk of life toward our ever-closer goal of lasting happiness and freedom is patient acceptance. In samsara, obstacles are cropping up in our lives every single day, and we have to be prepared to happily bob and weave. If we practice this we can keep a smooth and calm mind and we can get to where we need to go. Especially internally, but it also helps us deal with the external stuff.

What triggers our anger?

Anger on the other hand cannot accept whatever it is that is happening, and it then exaggerates what’s happening. As it says in the definition given in How to Solve Our Human Problems:

Anger is a deluded mind that focuses on an animate or inanimate object, feels it to be unattractive, exaggerates its bad qualities, and wishes to harm it.

If I had an instant dislike to that woman who didn’t stop, and I couldn’t drop that initial reaction, my next thought might be, “How dare she!” And I’d start exaggerating, imputing way too much significance on things that are not actually that significant or even true. I’d be thinking, “This is just obnoxious. You know, really, did she not see me? What was she thinking? I bet she does this the whole time, never looks where she’s going. I bet she’s always barging into people. I bet everybody really hates her.” I could have made up a whole story about her because that’s what anger does – it makes up stories about people and then believes them. This can all happen at the speed of light if our habitual response is anger – anger has stages, but we can only see that later in retrospect. And then, you know, I’d still be thinking about her a mile down the road. Just ruining my own day. She is most likely oblivious to my angry grumblings, but even if she isn’t, and I ruin her day as well, either way I can definitely ruin my own day.

It’s not all about us

So anger is an exaggerated response, and it’s also, as you can see from this example, an egoistical response. “How dare she do that to me, me, me, me, me? I’m important. My progress down the sidewalk is what matters here. The fact that she may be rushing to get somewhere before it closes or before her mother dies is not relevant. She got in my way. How dare she?”

As with every delusion, anger is absolutely pervaded by egoism or self-cherishing thinking “I’m more important than other people;” even though that’s patently untrue. We are not more important than anybody else, let alone more important than everybody else. This is clearly true from their perspective, but, even objectively, on which planet am I the most important person, more important than all of you reading this, for example? Anger thinks my needs and desires come first, but on which planet is that actually the case? Perhaps on Planet Luna, Population: 1; but on this shared Planet Earth, Population: 8 billion humans + a literally countless number of animals, no, I am not the most important person.

That woman had her own wish to be happy and free from suffering, just like me. She had reasons that were driving her down the sidewalk, just like me, some of them practical, some of them uncontrolled thoughts that are to this day driving her to sadness and despair for all I know. This is true of everyone on that sidewalk. Why just think about my own trajectory? All my own suffering comes from selfish desires – if I can put myself in their shoes, that in itself opens my horizons and my heart, releasing me from suffocating ego.

Compassion is part of our patience: as a world view, it helps us to pre-empt difficult people by not framing them as obstacles to our happiness but as suffering beings, and even sources of the happiness of enlightenment. As a response, compassion works too, helping us to get things done far more effectively and sustainably than anger.

The reason anger doesn’t solve our problems is because it’s a delusion that distorts and exaggerates, projecting a mental image of something that isn’t there, and then trying to deal with that. Although it masquerades as a solution-oriented mind, it is the opposite – it always makes things worse. We don’t need a response that doesn’t work, we need a response that does – and this is patient acceptance.

What do you think? Comments warmly appreciated.