Dung – the old jokes are the best.
One of my favourite books is “Who ordered this truckload of dung” by Ajahn Brahm (Now published under the title “Opening the door to your heart”). It is a compilation of stories that I often use in my mindfulness teaching.
The truckload of dung metaphor is a very clear and direct one: you return home one day to find a truckload of dung (manure) on your front garden. You haven’t ordered it and you can’t find out where it came from. It smells and is an awful sight. You can either moan about it and do nothing, or you can get to work and move it, spreading it on the borders in your garden. If you just moan and do nothing, you still have the pile of stinking dung, and you don’t endear yourself to your neighbours and friends. If you use it to fertilise your garden, the flowers will be more beautiful the next year.
In mindfulness we frequently talk about this as dealing with difficulty. Mindfulness practice encourages a way of engaging with life that does not ignore the problems that face us. Rather we are encouraged to engage with them in a constructive way. Our natural reaction when great difficulties come along is to resist them, to moan about them, or to pretend they are not there. Mindfulness encourages us to see things as they are, and that is the first step to dealing with our problems.
Many years ago I was mentoring a project manager who was having a number of personal issues, and (rightfully it turned out) thought mindfulness could help. She was so focussed on resolving the issues, it was hard to get her to see how an open awareness of how things are in the present moment could help. After a while I asked her to explain how, as a project manager, she would tackle a new project, what was the first thing she would do. Her answer was that she would review the current situation before making a plan – then the penny dropped. Mindfulness encourages us to review the current situation before we make a plan.
We all have deliveries of dung to deal with. Of course, if we can find out why they are coming then we should stop the deliveries if at all possible. However, some deliveries (health, family issues, disputes) can’t be avoided. When we have exhausted all possibilities of getting whoever delivered it to take responsibility (if indeed there is someone), then the only real solution is to get the spade and wheelbarrow out and start shifting it. There is an upside to dung if we are able to do the work – better flowers.
Of course, there will be times when we can’t deal with it ourselves – a serious illness for example where we need medical treatment. But even then, we can do our bit to aid recovery. The challenges life throws at us can be overwhelming at times, but seeing them clearly can be very helpful, and even small steps to ease the situation can make a huge difference.
Of course, truckloads of dung come along more frequently than any of us wish, are often bigger than we feel capable of coping with, and we all get involved in other people’s dung deliveries. No-one wants them, but realising there are practical strategies to deal with them helps put them in perspective. And of course we can always go and look at the flowers in our back garden.
