Today is difficult. I feel shit on. My job doesn’t appreciate me. My bosses treat me like I’m disposable and incompetent. They constantly correct me for minor infractions and overlook me for praise. I wish I knew why. I feel like I work very hard. I feel like my attitude is stellar. I am inordinately polite and happy to help everyone that asks. I get to work before anyone else generally and stay as late as necessary. Everything that is asked of me, I attempt to own. I really don’t know why my credentials and dedication are questioned.

When I was brought on as a freelancer I was brought on to produce. Then I was hired as an associate producer and took a pay cut because I liked the job and thought it would be a great opportunity. But shortly after everything changed. The department got a new boss and suddenly I was third, instead of second-man on the totem pole.

It was a functional demotion.

From then on, all of a sudden I was being “talked to” constantly. Being told how I needed to improve. Be more “proactive” I was told. Which is a funny thing to tell a subordinate who has been working at a place longer than you. Or am I crazy?

Maybe it’s because of how I dress. Maybe I look more like a music producer than an online producer. Maybe it’s because I’m Black and could pass for 22 even though I’m a decade-older. Because I have dreadlocks, because I’m easy-going and Southern and don’t like to get worked up about anything.

Does that make me seem irresponsible?

My disappointment at work (something I’ve never experienced before – actual investment in a job) has caused me to start praying again. Five times a day. I don’t know if that makes me a Muslim but it definitely puts me in the class of believers. I am a believer in prayer. And through prayer I am coming again to believe in the Almighty, but it is a path, not a destination.

The psychological underpinnings of my resurgence of piety are not especially difficult to penetrate. I seek validation. I seek encouragement. Once I found it in music and performance, now I seek it in work and fatherhood. I realize now both are equally vain in the long-term. All human dealings are tainted with disappointment. Only the individual striving toward self-actualization and faith in a universal order bring lasting peace. Only the continual opening of the heart bring remittance from the agony of doubt and social conflict.

when it’s darkest i call on the light
and i don’t know how dark it’s been until she shows up
all radiance and glory
i have no idea how long i have been walking
passing the same streets, ignoring all the same signs
how drunk did i get
did i fall in love
when she arrives she doesn’t care
into her arms she takes me
just as i am

I no longer apologize when something goes wrong at work. It’s always my fault anyway. The news would be if it were not my fault. This I have come to realize is the price of being low man on the totem pole – particularly in my profession of “online producer.”

Producer. What a vague and amorphous word.

There are music producers and movie producers, television producers and food producers. All kinds of producers. People responsible for getting it done. Project management people.

The annoying ones whose emails show up in your inbox with pestering questions like “When?” “How much” and “Why? Why? Why?” Not quite suits, not quite creatives, somewhere in between. Not really bosses, not really drones. Thinkers, but not questioners. Producers push the process along. We are human cattle prods.

What we produce, if we are good at our jobs, is an atmosphere of competence and security so that everyone involved in the process can comfortably get their own work done. We don’t actually ‘produce’ anything. We don’t run the cameras, program the code or even write the scripts. We just make sure all those things happen in sync so that the end result is a movie, a song, a television commercial, something bigger than the sum of its parts.

When I say it like that, I almost feel reverence. I would too if I didn’t already know how unglamorous this process is. If I didn’t already know that the job really involves a lot of calendars, pestering people and generally taking the blame for anything that goes wrong. In many ways it’s like being a personal assistant to a dozen or more people.

So I don’t get frazzled when it’s my fault. I don’t mind when it all goes to shit and I’m left holding the mop and bucket.

I know it’s my job to make everyone’s job easier.

My Zen teaches me that true strength lies in lying low, staying close to the foundations. Trees roots, building cornerstones, mud, shit. These are the things everything is built on. Almost invisible they provide everything we need. They make all the pretty flowers, gravity-defying skyscrapers and sequoias possible.

My Islam teaches me that God does not love the proud. To be a good worker is to be a faithful servant of God because it’s Him that doles out the to-do lists, not Outlook.

Even though sometimes I wish I were somewhere else, I fundamentally realize that I am here only because I need to be. Something I need to learn. Something I need to forget. I’m not sure.

But I won’t apologize for doing my job.

I was just minding my own business today when I stumbled on this article from my favorite news aggregator Daily Beast about judges taking kickbacks from private juvenile detention facilities for sentencing minors to them.

WTF scarcely covers it. These mofos got 87-months for their crime after pleading guilty, but that feels light to me. I’m thinking these dudes need some Islamic justice or something. A public caning to make an example of officials who so grossly betray their public trust.

I ask you, what kind of a debased, soul-less society do we live in when judges are taking bribes from kiddy jail to turn perfectly decent kids into baby convicts? These disgrace-to-decent-assholes-everywhere didn’t get caught until they sentenced a “stellar” student to 3-months in juvie for the grave offense of making a spoof Myspace page lampooning her assistant principal.

Seriously? No, really. Seriously?

Is the public supposed to be that dumb? Or is it that these buzzards know that the public is too busy to do anything about it? And in Pennsylvania where the state average is 1 in 10 juvie convictions, how did these guys rate of 1 in 4 go overlooked by the entire court system?

What kind of cynicism and apathy infects our collective spirit to allow things like this? Have we gone so far? Or is this business-as-usual since time immemorial? Greed runs rampant when there’s no sheriff in town.

And who today is willing to wear the white hat and fight back the savage heathens? Apparently no one at all. Apparently our only defense is the stupidity of the guilty.

It’s a basic fact. Old shit smells the least. New shit smells terrible. Like…well, shit. But old shit is dry, moistureless, aroma-less. It gives no indication that it is what it is. It could be dirt or mud or a thousand other common, but unrepulsive things. Fresh shit on the other hand leaves no ambiguity. Even when you can’t see it, you now it’s there. Somewhere. And if the smell is there no matter where you go, then you probably stepped on it.

This occurs to me as I wait at my job for another meeting to start and I have a second to reflect. Work is a such a good place to work on yourself. In my experience it’s a lot like school. You have to go there, you don’t like everyone and you’re constantly searching for your place. As such it’s natural to feel awkward, gawkish and generally like a spaz for most of the day.

It’s just this state of mind, the spaz mind, that is the best soil for growing new realizations.

I’ll use myself as an example. You see, recently, I’ve been having some trouble at work. A lack of focus I guess would be one way to put it. Laziness springs to mind as well. Whatever you want to call it, the urgency and gumption I had when I first started gradually dissipated into a feeling of carelessness, disinterest and aversion.

But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. There were some obvious disruptions to my day-to-day. We just got a new boss. Mel was having trouble with Langston who was teething. I felt a sense of dullish routine creeping into my mind but nothing specific.

I blamed my boss, which was easiest. I told myself that I was being ‘functionally’ demoted because before she was hired, I was Number Two in the pecking order. Now I was Number Three. More than that, now I was the absolute lowest on the totem pole. When I had been hired, I thought I had been hired as a producer. Now I found out I was actually an assistant producer. I didn’t know what the difference was. I didn’t understand why I was being demoted for performing well and above the call of duty.

I blamed my boss. I focused all my animosity on her. I hid my anger and slowly bitterness boiled up behind my teeth. I became afraid that it showed all the time. I was afraid my anger would ignite her anger and then I would be out of a job. I was afraid to make her an enemy and yet I couldn’t stop despising her. It was an impossible situation and an impossible consciousness to maintain.

Actually I blamed Mel too. Without knowing it, I blamed her for her problems with Langston. I convinced myself she was lazy, not trying hard enough and definitely not contributing as much as I was to the situation. I got angry. I wanted but could not find the words to express myself. Bitterness mixed with bitterness until it was all I could taste.

Then just this past Monday I went to a Zen sitting and for half-an-hour I shut up. For half-an-hour I listened to my ears and felt my skin and organs. I thought my thoughts, but not about them. I interupted my internal monologue. I turned off my TV and watched the screen impassively.

Amazing.

No boss. No Mel. No screaming infant. No job to lose. No welfare to consider. No title to obsess over. And yet not nothing.

I liked it. I liked it quite a bit. And by the time Noah, our meditation instructor, rang the bowl signaling the end of the sitting, I felt neither good or bad about anything. Which strangely felt pretty damn good.

As we sat Noah instructed us to be compassionate, friendly, toward ourselves and our thoughts. As I sat doing this, not judging my impatience, not getting impatient with my judgements, I realized a great void had been growing in me. It was a void made of bitterness and resentment. It was a cavern hollowed out by unexpressed, unsublimated anger. It had turned me into an echo chamber for negative emotions. No matter what was shouted into it, it came back sounding fucked up.

When my new boss tried to counsel me on how to improve in my job, she was attacking and undermining me. When Mel tried to organize family outings on the weekend, she was cutting into my me-time. No matter what positive thing anyone tried to do for me, I felt besieged. I was a victim of the story I had been telling myself. I believed in nothing but it’s moral – you are doomed, nothing you do can avail.

But just like that, I found I could turn off the story. I could shut down the narrative and take a fresh look at what was actually going on. I could be surprised!

I won’t sit here and say that I feel great about everything now. I won’t pretend like one night of sitting has cured me of 32-years of life on earth. But I can say this, at least now realize I’m tired of watching the same channel all the time.

Yeah, this old shit has got to go.

Yesterday I went to a Zen sitting led by Noah Levine, author of a book called Against the Stream and ‘Dharma Punx.’ I don’t know his backstory or why he came to Zen or anything like that. All I know is he’s majorly tatted up and he says ‘fuck’ quite a bit during his dharma talks. My doctor, a former Muslim, recommended the place and he seemed chill as fuck, so I felt I could trust him.

Because I know a lot of folks don’t know anything about Zen, let me give you a quick primer about a subject and practice which has fascinated me for years. First of all, Buddhism isn’t about worshipping anything. The Buddha isn’t God or a god or anything like that. The Buddha was a man named Siddhartha Gotama who was born to affluence but sought out a religious life, studied many paths and eventually claimed to have had an experience of absolute truth which he spent the remainder of his life teaching to others.

Zen Buddhism is one of the lineages that came from the Buddha’s original teaching (called Dharma in Sanskrit). Unlike many other paths, it doesn’t use much chanting, there aren’t many doctrines and very few devotional practices. Instead Zen focuses on each practioner directly experiencing the absolute truth the Buddha did. They accomplish this through sitting.

Lots of sitting. And breathing. And then sitting some more.

I did this last night for about half-an-hour guided intermittently by Noah’s voice directing us to pay attention to our breathing, the sensations of our body, the desire to get up and walk around, everything that was happening inside us. Not to judge it or to shut it up or anything like that. There was no trance to attain. We were not trying to go into a mystical state. Quite the opposite: we were simply sitting there feeling the aches in our body increase and minding our mind’s reaction.

Afterwards, Noah invited questions from the group. A woman asked about how to respond to an itch on her nose during meditation. Should she scratch it? Noah’s response: If you can tolerate it, tolerate it and learn a lesson from the fact that the itch, if left alone, usually vanishes. If you can’t tolerate it, then scratch your nose. Don’t judge, be compassionate to the body. Another man, a former soldier, asked whether violence was always wrong or if there weren’t times when it was necessary to fight evil. Noah’s take: I don’t know the answer to that. Investigate it in your own life. My experience has been that fire only leads to more fire.

He said ‘I don’t know’ more than any spiritual leader I’d ever heard before. It was refreshing. He said ‘check it out’ and ‘investigate it yourself’ more than I ever heard from anyone since my fourth-grade teacher.

I loved it.

Having been to a lot of different spiritual settings, this was the first that felt like work. Good work as a opposed to just basking in someone else’s spiritual attainment. Hard work as opposed to simply being told that I will be blessed. Coming from blue-collar Newport News, it appealed to my workman’s roots.

I think I’ll go again. Fuck it.

In a Wired magazine article, traffic engineer Hans Monderman expresses his loathing for street signs as representing a “failure” on the part of the designers. He goes on to say that a typical traffic engineer’s instinct is to add more – more signs, more lights, more directions. And this is precisely what causes more accidents, overall slower traffic and more danger for pedestrians and bikers. His work has shown that the less signs, the less direction, the fewer speed signals; the more integrated pedestrian and auto traffic can be and the smoother the flow of traffic.

Wow.

Where else can this principle be applied?

Working as I do at an advertising agency with many moving parts and lots of integrated departments coordinating in real-time to achieve a single goal, the relationship to traffic is obvious and undeniable. What lessons can we learn and apply to the traffic of our business-space?

How much of our ‘process’ documents and bureaucracy are impediments to actual productivity. In an effort to constantly ‘speed things up’ are we really creating congestion and over-reliance on externalized methods and learnings, rather than depending on our own intuition and ability to coordinate with actual human beings?

The more we try to externalize ‘mindfulness’ in documents and process methodologies derived from analytical learnings (whew, that’s a mouthful) the more we end up having nothing in mind. The more automatic we become and the more entropy we invite into a situation. Entropy comes when a system gradually loses energy (read: enthusiasm!) and eventually succombs to its own lack of motive power. I mean, your car engine can’t repair itself. It needs the infusion of your own energy, mindfulness and giving-a-shittitude in order to keep it running.

In the same way, the more we attempt to forecast problems, the more we try to solve all possible futures, the more we build ourselves onto an unchangeable track heading god-knows-where. We only hope it won’t hit a brick wall.

The only lasting solution is keeping our eyes open, our chests braced and our wits about us.