Gratitude, like mindfulness, is a virtue that is in style today. Geri Larkin, a Zen teacher, says that if you’re in favor of gratitude you have to give up whining.
She contends that public cellphone conversations, annoying as they are, are (1) public property and (2) great teachers. She listened and classified the calls she overheard: check-ins with kin, mushy stuff, planning and reminders. But three-fourths of the calls were whining.
In The Chocolate Cake Sutra, she provides the cure: at her house a whining hour was decreed. Only whining was allowed between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. daily. It was so miserable the experiment didn’t last three weeks.
The whining was replaced largely by silence.
I’ve always been interested in stories about human characteristics and human character. The so-called wisdom literature that readers know in the ancient books of Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach are good examples. I like Aesop.
But one of the biases of this collection of notes is that the teachers and thinkers of our day are frequently as good or better than the old. This might be better than Aesop.
Geri Larkin, The Chocolate Cake Sutra; New York: HarperOne, 2008.
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