Hanging with the Elephant by Michael Harding

think I’m incapable of keeping the kitchen organised?
    ‘I’m a modern man,’ he insists. ‘Some of my best friends are feminists.’ And he stares around the kitchen convinced that if he ever bothered doing the housework, he would of course do it far better than her. But I’m not that bloated with hubris. It’s just that we live five miles from a shop and so it’s not funny to forget. And I was going around from one press to another muttering, ‘Where did she leave the sugar?’
    No.
    ‘Where did she hide the sugar?’
    No.
    ‘For fuck’s sake, where is the fucking sugar?’
    The bottom line was that there didn’t seem to be any sugar. I had no choice but to drink a bitter black coffee, and skip the refinements of porridge, toast or marmalade. It wasn’t a great start. But it reminded me that there wereother issues. Like which bin was due to go out on Friday. I couldn’t remember if it was the blue one or the black one that had gone out last time.
    I knew that with the dishwasher not functioning because we were out of tablets, the kitchen would soon back up with dirty plates and cups. And I wasn’t going to start hand-washing them all. And then I couldn’t find the mop to clean up the cold coffee that had spilled straight out on the floor when I opened the lid of the coffee pot because I didn’t think there was any coffee in it. How was I to know that the pot was still half full of cold coffee? Doesn’t someone usually clean it before they go to bed? Yes? Well, there you go. So I made a note of that for future reference.
    But I was still looking for the mop. I tried the scullery, the shed, outside the back door, behind the fridge.
Where the fuck is the mop?
I wondered. I was getting exhausted and it was only 8.30 a.m.
    Maybe I need to relax
, I thought. Go out to my room and chill. Leave everything as it is for the moment. Go to town at lunch and pick up stuff. I could make a list of ‘stuff’. That’s the trick. That’s what women do. They make a list. That’s what my mother used to do. She’d have a list every Friday for me. Even if her mind was dissolving when she was in her late eighties, she always had her list.
    So I made another coffee and took it out to my studio. I crossed the back yard with the laptop in one hand andthe coffee and my keys in the other. It was raining and the rain splashed into the mug. I ran to the patio door, fiddled with the keys, almost dropped the computer, opened the door, and then spilled half the coffee as I went inside. And for fuck’s sake, what was sitting on the desk from two days earlier? The sugar bowl.
    At least now I was getting into better form because I was in my refuge. My shed. My isolated study where no one bothers me. And there were two firelighters left in the packet. The lake stretched before me. I cleaned out the ashes from the stove, placed the firelighters between two turf briquettes and set them on fire. Then I settled into a swivel chair to contemplate the day.
    It’s not just a phrase I picked up from some cheap self-help book about Buddhism. It’s what Pabongka Rinpoche said in his book
Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand
. And he’s the real deal. He’s the bee’s knees. You won’t find him on YouTube. He didn’t waste his time doing videos for the internet. Of course he’s long dead but the book is still out there.
    The mind is like an elephant
, he said.
    He would have heard the same phrase from his teachers when he was a young student in some remote Tibetan monastery. It’s an image commonly used for the unruly mind in lots of Tibetan texts on mind training. The elephant goes where it wants. And there’s no telling when an elephant will change its mood. There’s no guiding it ortying it down, unless you use the ropes of meditation and mind training at which Pabongka Rinpoche was apparently such an adept.
    My mind is like a particularly dysfunctional elephant. My mind is like an elephant that has escaped from traumas in a circus.