Listen to this note
There is a bully pigeon who visits the birdbath in my balcony. He struts around it like he owns the place, puffs up his neck and shoulders, pecks at the others and makes a racket until the timid ones fly off. Every time I catch him at it, I chase him away so the thirsty ones can drink in peace. To the pigeon, I'm sure I'm the villain of the birdbath.
I've been fighting for fairness for as long as I can remember. In my family, at work, in social situations, hell, even in the animal kingdom. And the same question always follows me back into the house. My compassion is only for the thirsty ones. Is it complete? (That I want my compassion to be complete is a topic for another time.)
For years, spiritual texts only made this more confusing. I read compassion and boundaries as opposites. If I were truly compassionate, I wouldn't need boundaries, and if I held boundaries, I wasn't being compassionate. Only now, with some real-world practice behind me, have I begun to understand how the two fit together. Note the emphasis on begun. I'm nowhere near absolute clarity yet. What helped a little was Chögyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.
Trungpa has a name for what I had been mistaking for kindness. He calls it idiot compassion: giving people what they ask for because refusing would be uncomfortable. Reading him, I began to see that saying yes in those moments was a way of closing down. I was shutting out my own discomfort, and my own clear reading of the situation, and calling it kindness. Think of someone who lends money, yet again, to a relative with a drinking problem. It looks generous. The one who says no has the harder job, though. She has to stay with the relative's disappointment and with her own guilt, right there in the moment, without looking away. I've come to think that holding a boundary often takes more openness than giving in.
So I stopped asking whether to have a boundary and started noticing how I set it. The same boundary can be set in two very different ways. Say a colleague asks me to take on some of their work, and I can't. In one version, I rehearse the line beforehand, say it a little too fast, avoid their eyes, and feel a small rush of relief when it's over. Done, handled, shutter down, walk away. In the other version, I say exactly the same words and then I stay. I notice they look genuinely stretched. I'm still open to them bringing it up tomorrow. The words are identical. What I'm doing with them is completely different.
It's the same at the birdbath. I can shoo the bully pigeon off with a small thrill of justice, or I can chase him away and still hope he comes back to drink once the others are done. The first leaves me feeling finished, a little solid, even faintly triumphant. The second leaves me slightly raw, and still in touch with him.
Which leaves me with a question. When I've drawn a line with someone difficult, what's the hard part: drawing the line, or staying in contact with them afterwards?
For me it's almost always the afterwards. Some people in my life keep coming back to requests I've already said no to. Each time, the unspoken accusation in their eyes makes me want to scream. They're asking for something I don't have the capacity to give right now. Thankfully, meditation lets the scream carry on. What it asks is that I don't let the scream push me into giving in or hitting back. Those are the only two things the scream wants, and either one would end the discomfort.
Trungpa explains this through the pāramitās, the six qualities a bodhisattva trains in. Pāramitā is usually translated as "transcendent," and in his reading it means action with no reference point: nobody standing by to keep score. Generosity comes first on the list, and śīla comes right after it. Śīla is usually translated as "discipline," which makes it sound like a rulebook. I think of it more as "natural integrity". It's how we act when we see a situation clearly, without having to force ourselves.
The order matters. Giving without any shape quickly becomes about me: my image of myself as a generous person, my wish to avoid a confrontation. That's how the money gets lent one more time. Generosity supplies the openness, and natural integrity gives it a shape. Each needs the other.
When I see a situation clearly, the no takes very little force. It's simply what's true, and I can say it warmly, briefly, without building a case around it. When I find myself white-knuckling it, rehearsing, bracing, gathering evidence for why I'm right, that usually means an argument is still running somewhere inside me. With the people closest to me, it almost always is.
The way I understand it, if being called selfish hurts as much as it does, some part of me is still waiting for their approval. The boundary is mine, but I'm still checking with them whether I'm allowed to have it. That's what makes the repetition so tiring. Saying no once costs very little. What drains me is defending my right to say no, silently, in my head, every single time they ask again.
Underneath the tiredness sits a prediction: they'll keep pushing until I give in. If I believe that, then no refusal is ever complete. Each one is on hold, waiting for an acceptance that never comes. I pay the price but never get the peace I paid for. Yet my no doesn't need their agreement to be finished. It's finished the moment I say it. When they raise it again, that tells me something about them. It says nothing about whether my no held its ground.
This is the price of fairness, and I pay it every time I remind someone of a boundary. To the person on the other side of it, I don't look fair. I look cruel. Selfish, rigid, heartless: I've heard them all. From the edge of the birdbath, I imagine the pigeon sees it the same way.
The labels sting because I keep a ledger of myself as a good, generous person, and every accusation lands as a debit. That ledger is exactly what Trungpa means by spiritual materialism - turning my goodness into a possession I have to guard. Being willing to be seen as the unkind one, without rushing to correct the record, is its own kind of giving. I give up my good standing in their version of events. Nobody gives me credit for it, least of all me.
Trungpa calls this transcendental generosity. The word "transcendental" can make it sound superhuman, but it's much plainer than that. The pāramitā has no reference point. Ordinary generosity gives something and writes it in the ledger. Transcendental generosity gives away the ledger too. That's what I'm attempting to give up. The boundary stays exactly where it is. It’s the ledger I’m learning to let go of.
Giving away the ledger doesn't mean I stop wanting things. I still want them to respect the line. I want them to stop asking. And when they ask again anyway, I feel like a petulant child who has just realised she isn't getting what she wants, while half knowing I never had the power to make them. The disappointment is surprisingly hard to sit with.
Here, again, the practice comes to my rescue. What I'm feeling is grief. Small, ordinary grief for something I wanted and can now see I won't get. There's no knot to untangle. Grief doesn't respond to insight. I can know perfectly well that I can't control what other people do, and that in the scheme of things this is small, and the disappointment will sit there anyway, quite unbothered by how right I am. My understanding hasn't failed. This is just how disappointment works.
A child in the middle of a tantrum doesn't need to be told that what she wanted was unreasonable. She already knows. What she needs is someone to sit nearby without asking her to be over it. So I try to be that someone for myself. The want was real, it was refused, and I'm disappointed. That's all there is to it. It doesn't have to be hurried along or turned into a lesson.
I've also noticed that telling myself "it's not a big deal" is a way of shrinking the problem so I can dismiss it faster. The size of the want matters less than I like to pretend. A hope has been snuffed out, and for the first few moments, a small hope being extinguished feels much like a big one.
“We are not afraid that smog and dust or other people's hatreds and passions will overwhelm us; we simply open, completely surrender, give.” - Chögyam Trungpa
It's easy to read this as something heroic, a heart thrown open to everything the world can hurl at it. I read it more modestly. Sometimes the smog is just the part of me that's sulking, out of arguments and still unhappy. Opening to it means staying with it, without deciding how much of it I'm allowed to feel.
I don't have to do anything with it today.