The mind looks for any way it can to block Love. This is because Love does not need to make sense. It exists outside reasons and logic and so is an existential threat to life lived according to the rules of the mind.
East Asian cultures value Family to the utmost degree. I write from Taiwan, where I am visiting family for the first time in many years. Whenever I am in this part of the world, my parents send me names of relatives to visit. When I ask who these people are, the connections are sometimes so distant that my parents aren’t 100% confident in what they’re telling me, but what they do communicate is that it would be really nice if I would go see them. That is the tradition of Family here.
There is another tradition called the Red Envelope. Red symbolizes good fortune, and these envelopes are filled with cash and given as well wishes. When receiving a red envelope, one accepts it with two hands and never, ever opens it in the presence of the person giving it.
On this trip, my grandmother gave me a red envelope. I accepted it with two hands, gave a courteous but not too solemn “Thank you,” and waited until I was back in my room to take the cash out.
My family here in Taiwan has lived on the same street for four generations. Their life is humble and poor. 60 years ago, my grandmother opened a bakery, selling a post-war import: a buttery “toast.” What was an innovation then remains their livelihood. My grandmother handed off the bakery to my uncles, who then handed it off to my cousins. My cousins’ youngest daughters now run around between crates of bread stacked into tall towers. The family talks about saving up money to buy a new, more automatic dough-mixing machine. These daughters will probably spend their lives on this same street running this same bread shop. It will be a life of long hours and repetitive slicing, sorting, and bagging. The bakery runs 364 days a year.
So when I pulled more than $1,000 out of this red envelope, my mind crashed.
The reboot sequence began rapidly. My mind strained to judge and make sense of the situation. It buzzed and buzzed in every direction like a swarm of cluster flies awakened after a winter slumber.
It first defaulted to anger: “This is so stupid of Grandma. I don’t need this money. They do.”
“Why would she do this? I’m going to give this back.”
There was grief: “How come there is so much inequality in the world? How come I get to travel the world instead of being one of my cousins born into this bread shop?”
Then fear and uncertainty: “Am I spoiled? How come I value exotic travel experiences when my family is content running this bread shop? Am I doing the most I should be to make the world a better place?”
At each step, my mind attempted to impose order on the situation. If only it could figure out why or why not I should accept this gesture. If only!
The judgment that had the most staying power was this one: “This ‘Family’ thing is a bit of a joke. Does Grandma really think this gift is meaningful to me? I don’t know anything about her. And she doesn’t know anything about me.”
It is true. She doesn’t speak English, and my Chinese is pretty poor. I’ve met her only a handful of times in my life. To call us “Family” is generous. She doesn’t know who I am or what I value, and the most advice I’ve gotten from her is “pray to Jesus.”
It was an impressive acrobatic of the mind. I took my grandmother’s gesture of Love and turned it into a reason to ridicule her, think of her as foolish, and justify forgetting entirely about her gift.
My mind would have gotten away with it, but I’ve practiced Self Observation enough that I caught this flurry of judgment and justifications. I smelled the signature of subtle resentment: the “how-dare-she-do-this” and the “she’s wrong” that underpinned my thoughts. I let it all float there, knowing it was just my mind struggling to understand.
I did not judge my mind for what it was doing, but I did let my feelings come up. Feelings with real wisdom behind them, not just the aforementioned ones that served the purpose of blocking me from interacting more deeply with the situation.
What came up was sadness. The sadness of realizing that my grandmother’s gift didn’t make sense and that she gave it anyway. Of realizing that Love can be like that. It doesn’t have to make sense, and it can exist beyond reason.
I realized that yes, my grandmother hardly knows me. That yes, her belief I am important to her because I am “Family” is a story she has. It is something she chooses to believe, and there is nothing intrinsically true about it. But no, that does not disqualify her gestures of Love because I’ll say it again: Love does not have to make sense.
My grandmother and I had a Gap of Cultures between us. She sent her love into this Gap, and there I had a choice. Would I receive it, or would I insist on running it through the filter of my culture?
Too often it is like this. If your culture matches mine then I accept what you offer. If it doesn’t, then into the garbage bin.
Her love was in the Gap of Cultures, and all I had to do was drop my well-thought-out reasons for denying it.
I let this crash over me: I could be Loved, For No Good Reason At All.
Then I let myself be Loved, For No Good Reason At All.
In the field of that kind of Love, the mechanisms of my mind trying to understand and judge the sensibility of this gift was revealed for just that—a silly mechanism of the mind. How pointless! Begone you cluster flies!
I cried and cried, and I let my sadness direct me to pick up the phone, call my dad, and ask him if he would help me invite my grandmother, aunts, and uncles to a lunch the next day.
He did, and when word got out, it was not just them that showed up, but also eight of my dad’s cousins. It made no sense to my mind that this thing of “Family” would make them travel to see me—and it didn’t matter if it made sense. I had Family, too, For No Good Reason At All.
