Illusions of Grandeur

  Before hopping on the bus this morning, I looked toward the east as the sun was just rising. On the side of a skyscraper in the distance, there was an eerie reflective glow, looking almost as though there was a banner displayed against the building's edifice. It made me realize that from a distance, it's so easy to make things more than what they are, or to have illusions of grandeur. Saying that we will do something big for ourselves sets a good benchmark, but one should never confuse the benchmark for the reality.
   The same, I found, is true about most things, including work. I usually have very optimistic ambitions coming into work. But I was just familiarizing myself with a relatively new process today, and thinking that somehow doing it repeatedly would get me 'in the groove' of the process. In reality, I was about halfway through my day when I started to think: man, this is so much harder than what I thought it would be, and I don't sense any progress in my numbers.. As soon as I finish processing one claim, a totally new one comes in, and I can only break even in terms of the numbers completed. So by the end of the day, I had to accept the fact that what I thought I was going to feel and experience wasn't the actual experience. And instead of comparing my outputs to the inputs, I had to focus on what I had achieved personally, compared to what I did yesterday. It's a modest comparison, but I suppose it's the best I can do.
    In meditative practice, I believe that the mentality has to shift away from a quantitative one, and even an experiential one. This is so because meditation is not an experience to be collected. It's more like a space of pure being where there are no judges, no winners or losers. If I can simply be with the experience as a totality without judging the outcome. If I put a fence around that experience, I know that the fence is not meant to stick or protect anything, because the next moment the 'boundaries' simply won't apply. Even what I wrote yesterday about 'pure motivation' does not mean that my experience today is going to feel particularly good or bad. It's a matter of being able to see things through the eyes of equanimity. I just need to be aware that expectations I might harbor are bound to be disappointed, because things always change and nothing is what we think it's going to be.
     Now, in light of this, I wonder what it means in terms of setting personal benchmarks at work. My thinking these days is that setting a benchmark in terms of numbers completed is necessary, but it's not sufficient. I say this because not everything can be quantified in a precise way (learning is one thing certainly that cannot be quantified). But the other thing is that if I am only quantifying my work, I am only learning how to have a strategic survival based mentality. I won't be able to develop other qualities if I continue to have this approach to life, including compassion. To put it in another way, if I only quantify what I do in terms of neat strict categories (numbers of things processed, completed, checked off, etc.) then soon I will be attached to the feelings of security that arise from it, and I will feel insecure if I am not meeting those targets. Even if I am not meeting them due to other commitments, I will feel that insecurity around numbers, not trusting that I am where I am for very specific reasons. When I contemplate those specific reasons instead of condemning myself for not meeting my quotas, I might find a space of compassion opening up. The compassion is not about having some sentimental attachment or pity, but more like seeing things as fraught with conditions, and respecting the conditions rather than trying to remake people into what we think they should be.