Certain dinner parties are great places for life advice. Just throw out a conundrum over the Rougail saucisse and everyone can dispense their parcels of hard-won wisdom with the wine.
At this one I was quizzing my fellow diners about how long it took them to let go of the grievous wrongs that had been done to them. You know, the ones where the utter injustice festers in your gut or rears its head at night in the form of an anxiety dream. Or, just when you think you’ve been cleansed, it ambushes you from nowhere as you clamber over rocks at the beach on one of the first sunny days of the year.
Oh, you’ve tried to let it go. You’ve constructed an elaborate, aesthetically pleasing bridge. You’ve made an effort “get over it” and “move past it”. You’ve tried all of those things and nothing has worked. Is it a time- healing-all-wounds thing, in which case how much time is enough, and is it somehow possible to accelerate the healing?
That’s what I wanted to know. I didn’t really mean to ask The Dinner Party. I think I’ve just been asking myself for so long that it came out by mistake, a fully formed grievance. How do other people find ways to move on from the hurt?
There was a man at the dinner party who knew exactly what I meant even though I didn’t spill the specifics. It wasn’t out of any need for privacy. It’s more that the specifics are boring and I am tired of recounting the sequence of events in my head, carefully honing every detail so the outrageous injustice is laid bare in HD-quality soreness.
The once exhilarating details of being hard done by grow duller with each recounting, until all you’re left with is an empty, acrid suspicion that, really, you should be well on the other side of it all by now.
The man at dinner had taken ill 15 years ago while working in England, and had to leave his job for a couple of years. He loved his work and had a good relationship with the employer. But when he came back off sick leave they got rid of him with barely a second thought. He was surplus to requirements. His sickness had given them just the opportunity they needed to downsize.
How long did it take for him to get rid of the dull ache in his being every time he thought of his old job and his old colleagues who had shafted him? A couple of years, he said. Hundreds and hundreds of days. “I sued them, as well, which helped,” he said over “Granny Rose’s rice”. (Granny Rose put potatoes in her rice – and oh my god, Granny Rose that was a genius idea.)
As I contemplated seconds, I thought about who was the one who was suffering here. Not the person who did me wrong. Even if they have a conscience (which I can’t confirm), they have built a bridge and moved on and got over it and are not waking at night feeling bad about their actions. No. I’m the only eejit in this scenario still playing this painful movie over and over in my mind.
Time helped for the man who lost his job. But another woman at the table had a more expedient route to peace, which came from (where else) Buddha. Pádraig O'Morain wrote about this practice in a column on begrudgery recently. It's all about increasing the gladness you feel for others – even the ones who have done you wrong.
“In the Buddhist practice,” he says, “you share in the happiness of someone you like, someone you feel neutral towards and someone you dislike.”
It’s the opposite of that idea of sticking pins in an effigy of someone who has wronged you. I resolve to cultivate happiness for the person I’ve been stewing over and see where that gets me.
The singing helped as well. It was a singing dinner party. I don’t know where you stand on the singing party spectrum; it could be anywhere from “my idea of hell” to “hand me that ukulele”. But I get a shot of joy into my system after these gatherings.
Two young women singing The Travellin' Soldier transports you to another time and place, and also makes you wonder if you ever had skin that clear and sparkly – and if you did, how come you did not notice it at the time?
A woman on a piano belting out Billy Joel's Piano Man makes you fall in love with a song that always annoyed you before.
Two long-married friends singing Jackson by Johnny Cash and June Carter gets you every time. I sing Paul Young's Wherever I Lay My Hat, That's My Home. Or, as one good friend likes to taunt me: "Wherever you lay your hat, you lose your phone."
Anyway, I was lighter on the way home in the early hours of the morning, with a song in my heart and a long-standing grudge weighing slightly less heavily on my soul. roisin@irishtimes.com