An Inside Job

Photo by: Stephanie L.

The other day I received an email from an elderly in-law that tripped the wire surrounding the Monkey’s Defensiveness Perimeter. In the email he informed me that his lifelong friend had recently died, and oh by the way, that he was disappointed to learn that I never found the time to drop off some product samples from my day job that I had promised to give his friend. The two facts were completed unrelated. His friend died (he was in his 80’s). I didn’t give him some samples of a product I sell. Yet, the wording of the email made my Monkey think that he was trying to correlate those two facts, that somehow my not dropping off the product contributed to his friends’ demise.

I mean, he would never ordinarily decide to write me with news like this about any of his other friends…we don’t really have that kind of relationship. It was clear to the Monkey and me that he was pulling a massive guilt trip on us, which left us for the moment, speechless. Or writeless. Meaning, I didn’t respond to the email. I let it sit a while.

Which was a miracle. How many times have you responded to an email with defensive-fueled fury, only to wish later that you could hit a “recall” button at the top of your screen, hurling the missive backwards through the universe of electrons, safely returning home to your inbox?

I told my wife the story, and how I felt peeved that he was pulling a guilt trip on me, and that me and the Monkey didn’t like how that felt. She explained that he was feeling horrible about the loss of his friend, angry perhaps, and probably wasn’t in the best state of mind when he wrote that email to me. She told me that he is also very proud of me, proud of my military background, and was probably frankly pretty surprised that I never got around to dropping these samples off at his friends’ house, what considering I’m so organized and all.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that it could be argued that these samples also have a slight medicinal quality to them (they are based on green tea) and he probably reasoned that if I could get these samples to his friend, they may have helped him live a little longer. So in a way, he might have decided that my failure to give him this product helped speed his friend along towards the beyond.

I firmly believe that the samples wouldn’t have extended his life. He was an old man, very sick to boot. The samples in question aren’t medicine. They are sodas, enhanced with green tea. They may have made his remaining weeks more tasty, but they wouldn’t have saved his life.

I knew this and the Monkey knew this and we wanted to tell him that we knew this, and while you’re at it, “Don’t make me feel guilty about your friend dying, I have enough to worry about in my own life without taking on the karma of people I’ve never met!”

But we didn’t. Thank God. Thank my wife, really. She told me to sit down and connect to how I felt. Not about how the Monkey felt, but how I felt. How I felt about learning that the friend of someone I care about died. How I felt about not following through on the request of an 84 year old man to do something nice for his friend. Period.

So I opened up Entourage, started a new message and tried to write. Dear Papa. Damn was it hard to overcome the Monkey’s will to defend himself on this one. I mean, he just installed a new alarm system. The Monkey needed some protection!

So I had to make a choice.

To defend the Monkey’s precious ego, or to reach out to someone with love and compassion.

Isn’t that the essential choice in nearly all of our waking hours?

But was the Monkey pushing me on this one. I stared at the half-composed email. Got angry. More defensive. How dare you call me out for not showing up? How dare you make me feel bad? How dare you insinuate that I could manage my time a little better?

But I won the good fight this time. Quiet the Monkey, I repeated to myself, over and over again. Quiet the Monkey. Quiet the Monkey. Quiet the Monkey. In time, he found a little patch of gray matter in the outskirts of my mind, curled up into a ball, and fell fast asleep, resting up for the next big fight.

With the Monkey catching some Z’s, I turned back to my email and simply told him that I was sorry for his loss and that I was sorry I couldn’t find the time to drop the stuff off. That simple. I hit send and was off to the next thing. Satisfied for the moment.

A few days later I got a two word reply: “I understand.”

And may your friend rest in peace…