Here’s the twelfth lojong slogan: Drive all blames into one. It’s simple, but by no means is it easy.
When something goes awry, the first thing we do is look for someone or something to blame. We toss blame around like a hot potato, refusing to hold onto it for a second longer than we have to. The wisdom of this slogan asks us to take all that blame bouncing around and hold it instead. Even if it singes us a little.
But, what if it really isn’t our fault?! I imagine this is the first defensive question that arises. What if I’m just an innocent bystander, or it was a misunderstanding, or you’d see it differently if I could just tell you my perspective? Why on earth would we take on blame that may not even be fair?!
Well, it’s not really about fair. It’s about stopping the chaos. When someone refuses to play the game of passing the blame around like a hot potato, things immediately get calmer. Think about it: people go bonkers when trying to determine blame. Shouting matches ensue, people say harsh things, someone brings up an old grudge. It gets so ugly. What if you just…take the blame instead? You could say, “The buck stops here” and just focus on what you can do about it.
When you do, a lot of the suffering and tension and ill will simply dissipates.
This ties in really well with the last slogan, “When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of bodhi.” Because when you decide to drive all blames into the one place you can control (you), you stop all the unhelpful musings about why it’s happening and simply do something about it. As Norman Fischer says, “Something happened, and since it did, there is nothing else to be done but make use of it.” So, you take the blame into yourself, absorb the chaos and defensiveness, and focus on right action.
When we hold the hot potato, we likely learn something, too. We may realize we hold some blame we didn’t see before we took responsibility. No one’s so self-righteous that they’re outside of this interconnected web of blame, anyway. Our innocence is a delusion.
But our peacemaking doesn’t have to be.
What hot potato can you hold this week, and what will it teach you?
Art Nicklaus
Love your post today. I have not always done this well, but there was this one time… I managed an office for a niche industrial services company in the Seattle area. I got a call from “Marty,” who wanted me to look at a job heat treating on his construction site a very complicated steel fabrication that would hold a huge telescope somewhere in Hawaii. I looked it over, took pictures and measurements, and we agreed on a price to do the job. A few days later I lined out a job supervisor and crew on the job and sent them out to perform the process. The next day I got a call from a very very angry “Marty.” He informed me that the fabrication we heat treated was now warped and out of tolerance, and that he and his company would have to start over, putting them way behind delivery schedule with his client. He yelled, he swore, and he demanded that we pay all expenses and costs for the mistake. He warned me not to avoid blame. When he finally stopped to take a breath, I replied something like this: “Marty, I am going to get in my car right now and come look to see where we went wrong. I want you to know without a doubt, that anything we did wrong we will make right, in whatever manner you choose.” When I got to Marty’s business and looked, I could see that our crew took some shortcuts that made the job easier for them, but ruined the fabrication. I simply confessed this to Marty. “It’s all our fault, Marty. You just let me know what you need from me, and you’ve got it.” Marty just stared at me kind of unbelieving for a few moments, then quietly thanked me and said he would get back to me. The next day, Marty called: “Art, we think we can save the fabrication by doing some cutting and patching and re-working it. If you will come down and do the heat treatment over again properly for no charge, we are willing to call it even.” And that’s what happened. We went on to do more jobs for Marty as time went on, and Marty and I had a great relationship.
Danielle Shroyer
Love this story, Art. Thank you for sharing!