Your Harmonium is so Irritating!

My downstairs neighbour knocked on my door at 9:30 in the morning. He wanted to let me know that he heard me play my harmonium at 9 AM. The sound went into his living room, he said, and he likes to sleep in on Sunday mornings. I said ok, but I had been told by people above me, on the same floor, and below me, that they can’t hear me play harmonium. I apologized and told him that I wouldn’t play it on Sunday mornings any more.

He said he hears my harmonium in his living room every time I play, and he’s been hearing it for weeks. But he’s not home from 9 to 5, so maybe I could play it then? (I thought to myself, dude, it’s a harmonium; I’m playing religious music. What would you do if I plugged in my electric guitar, cranked up my amp and played punk rock?) I said, ok, then I’ll keep the noise to between 10 AM and 10 PM, which are the house rules. So then he says, “I do really appreciate music, you know.” (I’m thinking, perhaps you like the idea that music is being played somewhere out there in the universe—but not anywhere that you can hear it. Musicians have to practice you know. It’s not like turning on the radio.) I said, ok, I’ll be sure and play it when you’re not home.

That was enough to make me hate this guy for rest of the day, as I’m sure he was irritated by me, otherwise he wouldn’t have said anything. So I’m irritated as hell, and I have to go to Sunday morning shamatha practice at Nalandabodhi.

In meditation, I am struck with the insight that it’s my irritation that wakes me up. It’s the fact that I’m irritated at this guy that forces me to pay attention to him, to every word he says, every facial expression and gesture he makes. It’s because of my irritation that I am completely tuned-in to this guy and everything about him, his likes and dislikes, his feelings, his complaints.

My irritation has become the means by which I stop ignoring him and I start paying attention to him, the means by which I have to think about him every time I pull out the harmonium, or go up and down the stairs past his doorway. Because he irritates me, I’m forced to consider his needs, in other words, to have compassion for him

It’s my irritation that is the very pathway to compassion for him, for people other than myself. Is there someone out there who bugs the shit out of you? Guess what—that’s your pathway to compassion for them.

Not only is it your pathway to compassion for them, it’s your path of both compassion and transformation for yourself. Now that you are irritated as hell by this or that person or situation, now you are AWAKE, and now you are forced to do something about whatever it is that bugs the shit out of you.

Systems theory says that systems only evolve when they are provoked by adverse conditions in their environments. The German sociologist Luhmann said evolution occurs in a system when something “irritates” it.

Tara Brach calls this practice “attend and befriend.” You pay attention to the things that bother you, befriend the irritation, and work with it as a means to transformation.

I could go the other route, which is to ignore him, act like it’s not such a big deal, it’s ok, I’ll just let it go, nothing bothers me, which is “pretend and defend”. You just act like nothing’s wrong, like you’re above all that. Only it requires a huge LIE. It requires a Broadway-level performance of “I’m so much above all that stuff” when really you’re seething inside.

So in order to keep up appearances like you really don’t care, to yourself and everyone else, you have to erase the one that irritates you, put them out of your mind, ignore them, push them out of your consciousness altogether, or invent a false image of that person that doesn’t irritate you.

That erasure is profoundly ignorant, and not awake, because ignorance is the root of samsara. Pema Chodron teaches that to ignore something is to be willfully ignorant, to refuse to wake up.

So is there someone or something out there, or in yourself, that bugs the shit out of you? Good, embrace it—that’s your moment of awakening. Way to go, bodhisattva.