Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Shooting the Arrow

I've had the police called on me for the felony of sitting in public, walking, exercising, being in a museum, trying to find my car in a parking lot. 99% of the time the cops come up to me with a look on their face like 'yeah...I gotta check out this bullshit.' I stay in a state of equanimity. I also know that my lighter skin tone makes people think I'm Latino some times, I don't have an 'aggressive' hairstyle of militancy (sarcastic here). I code-switch with ease, and I have the markings of 'de-escalation.' Most of the times the cops are visibly uncomfortable by the end of the exchange...perhaps the creeping suspicion that they are apart of something troubling. I say some encouraging words to them...not for my sake...but on behalf of the next black person they are confronting. I say something seemingly innocuous that may hit them later in the day when they have to approach a black woman or man who is sitting on a park bench and rightfully annoyed. I leave them with a time capsule thought for later and the next black person.

It's called 'pempa' in Tibetan...you shoot the arrow of consciousness forward to a different time and place. Technically, you're supposed to do it in death when you want to shoot your consciousness forward, but you can try it throughout the day in little actions. You wake up and shoot a thought forward to 4pm when you have a meeting or have to be somewhere uncomfortable. Blk ppl have been doing pempa in America for hundreds of years. We hollow ourselves out in a moment of threat and shoot our consciousness forward...we think of how we want to survive an interaction to see our kids, or imagine going home with a funny story of some uptight white woman calling the cops on us for sitting, we imagine walking in the door and saying 'baby, you won't believe what happened to me today...'  The forward-thinking actions do have power b/c -in that future- the police can't get to you. In that pempa the white lady or man who called the cops is just a petty racist in the rearview mirror. And by shooting forward, we can numb ourselves to the present moment. You've seen that look in black ppl's eyes confronting an exasperating situation and suddenly their eyes go dead and their tone gets flat...they are not there any more. They  have gone into the past or future...where the present indignity/threat/conflict can not harm them.

In trauma, we mostly go to the past...we shoot our arrow to a previous incident, or catastroph-ize by recalling other bad endings in societal consciousness. The mind readily draws on past stories to inform or enflame a current situation. But in 'pempa' you move forward. You keep moving through the flames. You fling the mind and the thoughts toward joy. And if you are in a present joy but anticipating.a future hardship, you use that peaceful platform to shoot a conscience arrow toward that future ordeal.

As a black person I'm shooting arrows of consciousness all the time. I'm careful not to go back. Only forward. And I try to shoot the arrow not only for me, but the next generation, for the cops, for even the perpetrator. 

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