The Worst Kind of Suffering: Mine

This past Saturday, I sewed a pair of pants and hemmed pieces of cloth to cover two doors that have windows in them. My pants are normally very baggy and where’s-the-flood short; recently I made a new pattern, with the goal that the pants would be longer and narrower, but a bit fuller at the bottom, so I can more easily roll them up to my knees for cycling.

This first pair of pants using the new pattern certainly is longer, but making the bottom opening larger made the legs much baggier than before; I didn’t realize those two goals were contradictory. The legs of my new (green) pants look like two giant stovepipes reaching down to the floor.

I tried them on for Tom and he said, “We could probably both fit in there.”

“Can I leave the house in them?”

“Sure,” he said without hesitation, which meant, “If you can leave the house in your regular pants, you can certainly leave the house in those. Why ever not?”

Saturday evening, we saw Crank, which wasn’t very good, despite starring Jason Statham. It was full of cartoonish, overblown violence.

I had reported chest pains here not long ago. Tom said it was probably indigestion, and as soon as he said that, it went away. He was probably right.

Tom is like the oracle, the person I consult when I have exhausted all other avenues and want a simple, brief and correct answer from someone who is incapable of entertaining a suspicious or combative thought; i.e., someone who is the exact opposite of myself.

“Why is this guy making these horrible eating noises?”

“He probably has no idea he’s doing it.”

“How can he think that when I told him I can hear it?” Which you bet I did.

“He’s probably been doing it for decades and thinks people in other cubes can’t hear him.”

“What will I do?”

“Move to another cube.”

“I might not be able to.”

“Maybe get an iPod.”

He turned out to be right, of course.

When I got to work this morning, I found out I’d received permission to move back to my old cube. Here I must make a shameful confession: I was so angry at my loud eating coworker last week that by Friday I wasn’t speaking to him, though I’m not sure he even knew, since he didn’t have occasion to address me directly that day.

I tried to convince myself that it felt fine and that I could certainly maintain this resentment for the rest of my life. I’m sorry to say it was my actual intention never to speak to him again, even if I did end up being able to move to another cube.

Sunday night, Eugene was talking about how to deal with this kind of thing: to note objectively what is happening and observe our own reactions, instead of seeing the other person as the cause of misery, but he also mentioned remembering that other people are suffering, too, and that everyone is always doing the best he can.

I decided that if I got permission to move, that would be great, but if I didn’t, I was going to redouble my effort to be present with my own irritation, and to remember that my coworker is doing his best, and that he is suffering, too, though not necessarily from the exact same thing that’s making me suffer—his eating noises probably don’t bother him a bit—and of course, my suffering is considerably worse because it’s mine.

So when my coworker came in this morning, I made a point of calling out a hearty “good morning,” and he responded in like manner.

When I saw the email saying it was OK to move, I lickety-split piled a load of stuff onto my chair and rolled off with it. The coworker asked in amazement, “Where are you going?”

I told him that the singing, whistling, loud earphones and eating sounds were too much for me; that I like him, but that it’s hard to sit near him. He said, “Oh, maybe when I was eating an apple?”

It was considerably more than that, but I didn’t elaborate. He mentioned that he is having some problem with his teeth, and also said that he had been going over to the lunchroom to have some of his snacks, bless his little heart, and then I saw how incredibly wrong I was to think he’d been doing anything on purpose to get my goat.

But, at the same time, I’m really glad I told him what I didn’t like, because if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have found out that I was laboring under a giant misapprehension. It also felt great to be friends again—nurturing a resentment for another couple of days would have been miserable, let alone forever.

The lifelong resentment: such a beautiful idea, but so hard to execute.

At the end of a lovely day back in my good old ex-cube, I stopped by to say goodnight to the coworker and he said something about the eating, and I said I was positive he hadn’t meant any harm, and he said that, actually, it wasn’t him doing those bad things at all, and we agreed it had been his evil twin.