Clouded Over with Accounts

Clouded Over with Accounts

An obstacle that has crept and continues to creep into nearly every day of my life is the accumulation of accounts with people. Keeping accounts is how my machine without awareness or consent keeps track or remembers real or imagined wrongs and tacitly allows my reactions to others to be affected by them. Even the daily list of these actions that I perceive as hurtful or wrong is quite astounding. I have observed myself keeping them as though they were a coveted treasure and that releasing them would be a significant loss of identity. Keeping accounts is an identification with people and an inflated picture of self-importance.

I have noticed something running in the background of my machine which keeps a self-righteous tally of how people treat and value me. When first joining the Fourth Way School, I lived in group houses called “Teaching Houses” with as many as 10 to 15 other Fourth Way students, each of whom used the kitchen, bathrooms, and other living spaces. All were responsible for maintaining a high standard of cleanliness and cooperation with other students. This created the perfect conditions for verifying the mechanicality of keeping accounts and observing it in myself and others.

My internal dialogue calculated whose turn it was to do the dishes, to make dinner, to clean bathrooms, mow the lawn, do weekly grocery shopping, dusting, vacuuming, etc. Each task was often accompanied by emotional interactions with one another and when my contributions were not acknowledged as I imagined they should be, I felt hurt or wronged. And from my imaginary perspective, some students did not contribute enough, and others thought their contributions intellectually or emotionally were more important than the menial tasks that were also an essential part of living together.

The unintended result of keeping accounts was brought to my attention when a student came marching into the living room after many months of hearing me practice piano at 6:00 a.m. in the morning. They thundered at me that they could no longer take being awakened so early every morning with the monotony of musical exercises. The cloud hanging over them had grown into a major storm and eventually burst into negativity. I have no judgement or blame about this student’s response. I only wish that I could have defused his account by being more aware of the effect my actions had on him.

This example makes me acutely aware of how important it is to bring awareness to these poisonous emotional accounts. With presence and self-remembering and external consideration of others, we create more presence for ourselves, and our own accounts defuse before they gather into a storm.

I chose this image for this post because it seemed to me as though the mountain is like our machine. It is capped from the sun by accumulating accounts, producing a growing cumulus cap cloud unless we live from a state above the clouds. Keeping accounts is a cloud which shields us from growing toward the light which is always there.

“Higher yet and higher out of clouds and night, nearer yet and nearer rising to the light – light, serene and holy where my soul may rest, purified and lowly, sanctified and blest.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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“Cap Cloud” over Herðubreið volcano, Iceland. Photographed by Edward Huijbens.