The places that scare you

I fell to envy the other day.

It happened so innocently.

I’d gotten a Kindle from Donny for Christmas and since then the only thing I’d done with it was turn it on. I get in a slump at this time of year, which I know intellectually to expect, but had begun to make up reasons for. Not doing anything more with the Kindle was part of the general malaise, but then a friend gave me a gift certificate to put something on it, and she’s such an enthusiastic type that I figured it would be a real disappointment to her if I didn’t do it sooner rather than later. Besides that, I was bored for being totally uninspired and unmotivated, so I suppose it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I went from that lowly state to the unlovely envy.

I was going to buy my own books on Kindle, but thought I might have enough for one more, so had pulled up books listed under Spirituality. I was rather weirded out not to have heard of most, maybe not any, that were on the first page. I kept clicking next page and next. Then, at number 30 something on the list of top spiritual sellers was A Course in Miracles.

I know A Course in Miracles is right up there, so this wasn’t exactly a shock to me, it was more as if I suddenly felt the discrepancy between being number 30 and number 300,000. It didn’t seem right! It didn’t seem fair! What the hell was going on? What was it going to take for people to start reading A Course of Love? I shook my head. It didn’t seem to make any sense.

I got out of the “top sellers list” area fast and tried to order the Treatises and Dialogues only to be told I had “one click shopping.” There was no offer to let me use my gift certificate. I shut the Kindle down and went to bed (where I’m still trying to read the 50 pound book Jonathan Franzen wrote and his publishers brought out in a very hard hardcover).

When my arms got tired of holding it up I had time to consider all those envious feelings that wavered between not caring and caring. All those feelings that turn, slowly but surely, into wondering, “What’s wrong with me? What am I doing wrong?” I was a fret with it.

The lucky thing was that today, I picked up a Pema Chodran book. I only did it because I was cleaning my room (what else do you do when you’re uninspired). I was trying not to feel lazy besides. The book was, “The Places That Scare You,” which could have described my room about then.

I’d never read more than a chapter from it and was going to move it out of the “must have by the side of bed” pile. I didn’t even know what it was doing there or how long it had been there, buried and dusty. But I flipped it open and it happened to fall to this chapter on Laziness, which I thought I’d better sit down and read immediately.

Later on (I quit cleaning and kept reading) she said she’d been envious of a friend when her book sold more copies.

I wanted to shout “Alleluia,” and “Hooray, we’re all human!”

I felt like I walked into one of those places that scare me and found a friend.