The Book of Joy

The real secret of freedom may simply be extending this brief space
between stimulus and response. Meditation seems to elongate this pause
and help expand our ability to choose our response. For example, can we
expand the momentary pause between our spouse’s annoyed words and
our angry or hurt reaction? Can we change the channel on the mental
broadcasting system from self-righteous indignation—how dare she or he
speak to me like that—to compassionate understanding—she or he must
be very tired. I will never forget seeing the Archbishop do exactly this—
pause and choose his response—during a pointed challenge I had made
some years ago.
We had been engaged in two full, exhausting days of interviews,
hoping to create a legacy project around his pioneering work with the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. We were many
hours into the dialogue with a film crew, and he was visibly tired and
frankly a little cranky. It was not easy work to try to describe
systematically the process of truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation that he
had used so effectively but often instinctively to heal his country.
At one particularly tense moment I had asked him about his decision
to return to South Africa from England, an event that had profound
implications for the anti-apartheid movement and the freeing of his
country but also had quite painful consequences for his wife, Leah, and
their children. Not only were they leaving a country where they were free
and equal citizens to return to an oppressive and racist society, but also
they were choosing to break up their family as well. The apartheid
government had created Bantu education for blacks and other nonwhites,
an educational system that had the specific goal of educating its students
for menial jobs. It was the purposeful mental subjugation of generations
of students. This would never be tolerable for the Archbishop and Leah,
and they knew they would need to send their children away to a boarding
school in Swaziland.
This had been one of the most difficult moments in their marriage,
and it had almost broken them. Certainly it had caused Leah enormous
pain. After saying that few marital disputes are vindicated by history, I
asked the Archbishop if he had ever apologized to Leah for the pain his