Spam as Spiritual Practice
They come to me daily. They are as predictable as waves, As plentiful as rain. They are spam and as far as I know there is no singular form for the word.
They are the first thing I see when I start my workday. Most prevalent and creative are the exhortations for organ enhancements. Ah, had I a penis I doubt that I would send money across the internet to a snake oil cybersalesman. But – some poor soul obviously does.
Next come the offers of cheap Canadian drugs followed closely by the demands to re-fi my non-existent house regardless of whether I actually have any means of income. (No credit. No job. No problem!). Then - the off-market softwares, the porn, and once, inexplicably, a dating service intended exclusively for Christian singles.
Last, but by no means least, are the e-mendicants - the victims of circumstance who just need a little helping hand to get back on their feet. Recently, I’ve been contacted confidentially by a select number of Nigerian bankers with large, uncollected bank accounts at their disposal. If I could only lend them my considerable clout and expertise we could apparently split the 25 million between us! But why would I need it? My e-mail address just won the Swedish lottery and a free laptop.
Once I left town for three days and received 256 messages when I booted up my laptop on my return. Not one of them was from anyone I knew. All of them reeked of desperation and immediacy.
When I tell people about my morning visitors they’re bemused as to why I put up with them. Get a spam-blocker, they say. I tried that already.
The first one I used would send me e-mails saying, essentially; “we think this e-mail is spam – what do you think?”
They would then very considerately attach a copy of the offensive e-mail so that I actually took twice as long to wade thru my mail. Once to click open the spam “blocker” e-mail; a second time to make sure they hadn’t made a mistake and weren’t blowing away an offer from Knopff to publish my book with a record-breaking advance. This system didn’t stay for long.
“Really”, I scolded my computer. “If you can’t tell what’s spam and what isn’t what am I paying you for?”
The second one I tried was one of those nifty inbox guardians which would shoot back to all my would be e-mailees requiring them to put letters into a box to prove that they had opposable thumbs in lieu of a motherboard.
I thought this was a great idea until I started getting the same kind of “Halt, who goes there” treatment from others. I would slave over a hot keyboard and shoot off a carefully crafted e-mail only to return to my inbox an hour or two later to feel a hand on my shoulder.
“Not so fast, young lady. I’m going to have to ask you to come along with me and provide some identification.”
Why did this always leave me with a lingering feeling of guilt?
So that one went by the wayside, too.
Now there’s nothing between me and the spammers but a keyboard and a brain. Both of which belong to me. I know that if I really put my mind to it I could find the ultimate spam solution. But I don’t do it.
Why, you ask yourself?
Well, here’s my guilty secret. I think I would miss them. They serve a purpose in my life and they’re good practice.
I know, I know. Theirs is truly a tale sung by an idiot. Full of sound and fury. And, of course, signifying nothing.
They target the sorrows and the man-made suffering of the world. They hone in on our desperation and insecurity. We’re sick and we can’t afford medicines. We’re poor and we dearly want a home of our own. We’re tired of working day after day with no emotional or financial appreciation. We want to buy cheaper than the other guy. We want more. Somebody else has more. We want to get there. Wherever “there” may be.
As a Buddhist, I’ve been taught that there is pain and then there is suffering. We age, our eyesight fails us, teeth rot, we fall out of love, our friends pass on, the IRS audits us, our kids get sick, the pipes break. That’s pain. The everyday crap of living. But it’s not suffering. It’s our response to this common or garden pain which causes us to suffer.
Most of us have expectations that bad things won’t happen to us. The guy next to us may die but we’ve got a good shot at beating that rap. And when our loved ones eventually do slip away from us, as they inevitably do, we experience sadness, fear and surprise.
Nevertheless we try to pick and choose what we allow into our lives so that we can sculpt our personal environment to our taste. The anxieties and the dissatisfactions are still out there only they’re in someone else’s world. And we simply won’t let them in. Right?
The Buddha also taught that we create our suffering by attaching to some things and rejecting others. We use our discriminatory mind to cherry pick what passes for reality. But only when we have complete acceptance and awareness of all things can we experience things as they really are and not as we would wish them to be.
I’m sure someone else could explain that better than I just did. But whether or not I can parse the Buddha’s words I understand what he was getting at.
I think, also, that’s why I spend the first few moments of each day methodically clicking through all those obnoxious e-mails. It occurs to me that spammers wouldn’t continue sending out their garbage if some people didn’t respond to them. And, no matter how low the response rate, this reminds me that there are people out there who feel so bad about themselves that they really would send money to a stranger in the hopes that he could make them feel a little better or make their lives less painful.
That’s samsara. The man-made world of suffering. The people who create it for themselves and the opportunists who exploit them.
At least the tele-evangelist with the bad rug pretended to care about your soul.
So, I let the misery of the world into my inbox each morning. I see it and accept it. I know I could succumb to it tomorrow. But for today I choose not to. I remind myself that a myriad of desires and expectations are still out there. But each flick of the mouse reinforces that I simply don’t have to pay attention to them. I can pay attention, instead, to what needs to be done in my life.
