Performing Badly

 This morning in the Chan Hall, I made the mistake of hastily folding a towel, just before "modelling" how to enter and exit the Chan Hall. The Fashi went over and showed everyone how to fold the towel properly and "with respect", while I stood by quite flummoxed and beside myself. I reasoned to myself that perhaps the whole idea of demonstrating how to fold a towel is that you need someone around who has no idea how to fold one properly or correctly! Of course, one can go on about this and wonder if such a rationalization is perhaps too evasive. The point is, there is no reason to necessarily excessively feel bad that something wasn't done properly or correctly; one can only take it as a learning for the next time.
    This is not the first time it happened to me. In fact, on my very first 3 day retreat, the Fashi (a nun) had told two of the volunteers to show me how to fold a towel correctly. Back in that time, I felt both ashamed and a little bit angry that I had been called out on something like this. But this time, I don't feel any sense of real anger. I take it that there are many ways of looking at something, and part of what one needs to do is keep their minds and hearts open to possibility. For example, how does the "bad student" furnish the possibility for new ways of knowing, simply by virtue of "performing badly"? There are a lot of ways to go with this, such as giving the teacher the opportunity to hone in on their practices, or allowing the student to redefine or reconsider their practices. But it's not a good thing for this type of situation to create impossible conflicts or divisions. It's better to acknowledge that students do make mistakes at times, and not to reflect that on the student as a person, but more to look at it as a series of conditions that arose in that moment.
    Performance is really just performance, and I do believe that everything we perform (and the subsequent feedback) does get stored in the mind in some way. There is therefore no need to be excessively critical but to keep in mind for the next time that something could be improved.