Mindfulness and bullies

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At age 9, I crashed a bicycle and lacerated my penis. I remember screaming. One of the “big kids” scooped me up and bore me home at a trot. My briefs were soaked with blood. My mother, her fear apparent, sped me to the clinic a few blocks away where a nurse cleaned the wound. When my mother stepped out of the room, the nurse, Mrs. _____, glared at me and spat, “We’re going to have to cut it off!”

I believed her. I was a kid, terrified. Later, when the doctor (male, of course, back then) assured me I would be fine and didn’t even require stitches, my relief was cosmic. I thought Mrs. _____ had simply been mistaken.

Only long afterward did I wonder why a nurse would say such a thing to an already traumatized 9-year-old boy. A psychological quirk? An expression of militant feminism? Was I a surrogate for an arrogant doctor or an abusive husband she longed to figuratively (or literally) emasculate? Don’t know, but even now I rarely enter a medical facility without thinking about her, and am relentlessly courteous to nurses.

A couple years later, I was taken captive. I was riding that same bicycle just outside our immediate neighborhood, when a muscular older boy with a lantern jaw already supporting a five o’clock shadow confronted me. He was also astride a bike, and made it clear I was to ride beside him. For the next few hours he herded me like a sheep, exuding menace. I’d seen him ferociously fight in the schoolyard. He hinted at dire consequences if I should stray. Fear kept me in line, conviction that an escape attempt would fail. Finally, around suppertime, the boy/man said, “Go home!” I vigorously pedaled away, euphoric at being uncaged.

During my senior year in high school, I was again a prisoner — this time in the back seat of a rattletrap Ford sedan. It was a friends-of-a-friend situation, a hundred miles from home. There were five of us in the car and, aside from my buddy, I knew no one. Our cargo was four firearms, several boxes of ammo and a case of beer. The mission was deer-shining and general mayhem, and I’d been drafted.

The warlord was Ed — big, ragged, angry. He seemed perpetually tense, as if on the verge of throwing a punch. His rage was bloated by alcohol, and he barked commands and curses from the front passenger seat, brandishing two pistols — a .22 automatic and .44 Magnum revolver. He shot every road sign we passed. They clanged like bells, wobbling on their posts. Ed hooted. When a gun was empty, he’d shove it back at me or my buddy, and we’d quickly cram cartridges into clip or cylinder. About every other cycle, we’d pop open a beer bottle and pass it across with a reloaded weapon.

We careened across abandoned fields, and when the eyes of deer flared in the headlights, gunfire compressed the atmosphere of the car. The guy on our left was firing a .30-30 Winchester, peppering us with ejected shell casings. At one point we spotted headlights out on the road and skidded to a stop, the engine killed, our lights snuffed. A county deputy? A game warden? We stared at the lights, and there was a communal sigh when they passed out of sight. Ed spat, “Let’s get out of here!”

We steered toward the road and I trembled with relief, but Ed swiveled in his seat and pointed the .44 at my face. The muzzle was an inch from my nose. He cocked the hammer, his finger curled around the trigger. His voice was venomous. “If you ever tell anyone about this … I’ll kill you!”

I stammered a vow to never tell. He held the gun there for a long moment then slowly lifted it away. The Winchester guy snorted, but Ed shot him a wicked sneer and he clammed up. I believed Ed with all my heart. I hated his guts.

In the movie “The Imitation Game,” actor Benedict Cumberbatch as the brilliant mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, who had often been bullied, says that people like violence “because it feels good.”

That resonates, and evolutionary psychologists could likely list primeval adaptive benefits for a readiness to fight or to intimidate. Or perhaps we need explore no further than the National Hockey League, or recall the comment of General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862: “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”

The thread linking my three incidents is their intensity. Though I wasn’t the generator of the force or fear, the memories are vividly detailed. Even stronger is the recollection of the emotional surge. There was a texture and depth to those moments that has endured more than half a century because I was mindful, fully present.

Mark Muesse, a professor emeritus at Rhodes College, defines mindfulness as “a deliberate way of paying attention to what is occurring within oneself as it is happening.” My sensations were not deliberate on those occasions, but as Muesse also notes, “people often report a heightened sense of awareness whenever their lives are endangered … as the mind marshals its resources to prevent itself from perishing.” And all that is required is the perception of threat. For all I knew, the relevant chamber of Ed’s revolver was empty.

Violence, or the threat of it, is usually a lame problem-solving strategy. What may be gained by the application of pain and fear is mostly negated by the bitterness it inspires. In both personal and tribal relations, if you attack someone, it is the rare individual or tribe that will not counterattack. That’s World History 101. Chances are, they will feel good about it; revenge will be cherished at a fundamental level. I suspect Mrs. _____ got a charge from my terror, at least for a moment. She was present.

Fortunately we are adaptable beings, and there are alternate routes to mindfulness. Meditation is one. I began practicing 12 years ago. Books and videos have lauded its benefits, and mindfulness meditation is on the cusp of being a fad, even a prospective panacea. The beauty is that without cost or harm anyone can judge its effects, requiring only time and a place to sit.

Being focused on the present is potent revelation. When you pay attention to your thoughts you quickly realize how many are negative. Fear, sorrow, worry and regret seem to dominate our default mental status. Try it — think about what you’re thinking at any odd moment, note the content of the routine ejecta of your mind. It’s disconcerting. Since what you pay attention to is automatically what’s important to you, it’s advisable to understand this saying attributed to Buddha: “Whatever an enemy might do to an enemy, or a foe to a foe, the ill-directed mind can do to you even worse.” We burden ourselves with a past that can’t be changed, and/or a future over which we have limited control and that is largely unpredictable. Cultivating mindfulness is about seeking equanimity. It is not “the power of positive thinking,” but a recognition that if you don’t inhabit the present, you are missing most of life, ricocheting between what’s already done and what may or may not happen. If you are not here/now, then exactly where/when are you?

Though I’m a neophyte meditator, I can affirm it’s altered my cognitive process for the better, and occasionally, while just sitting and breathing, I’ve gleaned insights from a mind that’s at least temporarily cleared of noise; nothing earth-shaking, but personally valuable thoughts that probably wouldn’t have materialized when I was mindless. It feels good. Good and sharp. As Dutch philosopher and lens grinder Baruch Spinoza wrote, “Bliss is virtue, not its reward.” Mindfulness is a state worthy of itself, but if established and maintained, affects your entire environment. As individuals interact, the benefits of being present proliferate.

If most people on the planet were mindful most of the time, would we transform the human condition? Would we all feel comfortable and lucid enough to transcend World History 101? Would there be less suffering, intimidation and terror? Fewer tyrants and bullies? In my opinion, yes. You’ve heard it said: There’s no time like the present.

Peter M. Leschak, of Side Lake, Minn., is the author of “Ghosts of the Fireground” and other books.