Perfection, Compassion, and A Letter to My Waitress
By: Dayna Dunne
Tags: Spiritual Growth, Mindfulness, Compassion

Dear Anorexic Waitress,

I want to serve you food… I could stop there, but I can’t. I’m the one who tried to level the table with a wad of sugar packets. You stepped in with a couple of plastic shims and a menu, and handled the job yourself. Two seconds into knowing you I was looking for signs of distress: dusty hair, vacant blue stare, arms long and limp, hip bones popping through your dungaree-covered floorboard like an extra set of knees. You reminded me of a baby goat (in pants) (in mask) and I was worried. If you weren’t protected, the world—maybe you—wouldn’t let yourself live. And you should live. You are the kindest person I have ever met with her own set of shims. You’re too kind, really, which seems impossible because how can anyone be too kind, too rich, or too thin?

If I could have four superpowers, one of them would be the ability to cast a clear cloak of protection around all beings who need it: animal, vegetable, vulnerable people like you. I’m not one to pity, because pity is shitty and it takes away a person’s power. Still the first responder in me wondered if you were all right. Put another way, the first responder in me wondered if there was something wrong with you, and if there was something wrong with you, then what could I do to set you right?

I asked how you were.

“Good,” you said. “Tired. In school. Interning.”

You ignored your other tables to talk about writing. I would have ignored them, too. They don’t make you happy. Talking about copywriting makes you happy. I thought it might be possible that I was wrong about you. I’m skinny (and usually hungry). If I could give you my hunger…

There was too much on the menu. I asked what you liked best.

“The vanilla tea,” you said through your pebbly grin.

I was thinking of something a little more substantial but I’d give it a try. As you tottered away, ati came to mind. Ati(atiyoga or Dzogchen) is a Buddhist teaching that posits the true nature of everything—all of us, the Universe—is pure and perfect just as it is. Always has been, always will be. It’s one of the hardest teachings to reconcile and routinely blows my mind.

Last year, I met Willie at the holistic health care center. I’d been staring at a ceramic fisherman wading though the fountain in front of the reception desk when she sat next to me. The fisherman had a hole in his hand where his pole should have been. I was wondering what else he could hold—a cocktail umbrella, paperclip maybe. Willie was in her late fifties with a tight cap of curls, graying at her temples. I said hi.

She jerked her head back, frowned, and then asked if I was a Pisces. No, but I quickly shared my sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, and rising sign. She waved her arm in the air and asked how I handled it.

I didn’t know what she meant.

“The wooorld,” she said, hitting me with her side-eye.

I narrowed both of mine.

“I’m serious,” Willie said. “How do you handle it?”

“I put it in the wake behind me,” I said, turning back to watch the fountain.

Willie went on to tell me about her ex-husband, the Marine Corps, how she’d recently unloaded everything she owned and was living in a studio apartment with windows that looked out on a big, lively ficus tree. She read oracle cards. Did I want a reading? I didn’t want a reading. Her dad had been a big shot psychiatrist. I nodded with interest.

“Don’t do that,” Willie said. “He doesn’t deserve that. He molested my sister.”

I think I exhaled. I know I apologized.

One night, when Willie was thirteen, her father walked into her bedroom. She looked him in the eye, pointed a finger in his face, and said with a force no one expects from a girl, “You will not put your hands on me. Get out.” He left her room and never touched her. Problem was he kept raping her sister, and her mother kept allowing it. Willie’s victory was quashed by the painful lesson that her voice alone couldn’t make anything better. She left home as soon as she could.

The doctor walked out of her office and called my name. I stood reluctantly. It seemed odd to leave Willie alone, as if somehow our time together wasn’t complete.

“You know,” Willie said. “When I heard you speak I thought oh no, honey. What do we have here? But I get it now. Your voice gets you in the door. They don’t see you coming. They hear me, they run. Use that. Any time anyone comes at you, you tell them: My voice may be soft, but I am hard-core. Then you look them in the eye. Don’t say another word. Let it sink in.”

I did. And I do. And you were right about the tea—the tastiness, the weight on my tongue. When talk turned to cippolini onions and house-made potato chips that need more salt, I knew I’d been wrong about you. I apologize for thought-jumping all over your appearance and making your body wrong. I know what it’s like to starve—not for food, but for other things like security and inner peace. The world is no better for our secret judgments. In fact, I think they cause irreparable harm. You are not a small long-ago me anymore than I was Willie’s sister, but we seem to bring everything to the table whether we know it or not.

There is nothing wrong with you.

There is nothing wrong with anything.

Ati… For two…

Except, I don’t know how Willie’s early universe could have been perfect-as-it-was. I don’t see “perfection” in violence. I see anger and pain and unmet justice. I’m stumped until I remember the Three Pure Precepts: Do no harm. Do only good. Do good for others. Willie’s parents deliberately violated all three. Reason says they must be excluded from the set. As in: People who harm are not perfect as they are. They’re rule breakers. They fall outside of ati. I can feel myself heading into righteousness and for a second I feel better. But then I sense the tea cup in my hand—the warmth and weight of the porcelain. The weight of it.

One of my teachers, a Buddhist yogi, used to say: “Have compassion for all, but really have compassion for people who deserve it the least.” Why would come to mind (and mouth) and he’d follow up with something quippy like “if you don’t have it for all, you don’t have it at all” or he’d shrug his shoulders and say, “not having compassion only creates more suffering in you.” I feel pretty good judging Willie’s parents. Their actions were harmful and the children received no justice. But I have a desire to live in a compassionate world, and for that to happen I must be compassionate. But I’m not. Compassion is easy when I happen upon a worm struggling to scoot across a dry road and I redirect it toward a flowerbed with a fallen leaf.

1. I suffered with the worm.

2. I didn’t run away from it.

3. I wasn’t overwhelmed. I didn’t pretend the worm’s suffering didn’t exist.

4. I placed myself in its “shoes.”

5. And I took action to alleviate its suffering.

But for “people who deserve it the least”? The most compassionate thing to do would be to remove them. Preferably before any damage is done. I mean, you don’t leave a buzzsaw running in the middle of a playground. You pull the cord, wrap it up, put it away, and take care of the children. But how do we remove a violent person without becoming violent ourselves? Compassion asks for our sympathy—a cognitive understanding of what another being is feeling; a cognitive understanding of what all beings are feeling. Do perpetrators suffer? My teacher seemed to think so.

I call for Compassion. She arrives breathless before me, smelling like an autumn evening bits of leaves in her hair. I ask her to sit close and tuck her in. She looks up at me, wiping her runny nose with the back of her hand, waiting for me to speak. Ati challenges me to accept that everything is perfect as-is, while trusting that what presents itself is not all that is.

Compassion wants action.

We wait.

My fingers are itchy. I stretch them out, scratch them with my bottom teeth. I balk when I’m asked by the practice to put myself in a perpetrator’s shoes. We have nothing in common until I realize my thinking has, at times, rivaled the actions of Henry VIII. Just then, metta flies in like a hummingbird and hovers. Compassion opens her hand and the little bird lights. If it’s true that I want all beings to be safe, happy, free from suffering, filled with and surrounded by loving kindness, then all beings are included in that set. The belief that Willie’s parents are undeserving is whooshed away. If they had been safe or felt safe, if they had been truly happy, if they had been free from suffering, filled with loving kindness; would they have harmed their children? I don’t think so.

Justice is another thing. And you just brought a grilled Fiscalini sandwich packed with sun-dried fruit. It’s delicious, by the way, and only made better by watching you clap at my good order. It’s not often we’re celebrated for our choices. Thank you. You’re a gift, and I’m grateful for you.

Dayna