enlightenment at sam's club
by lavinia plonka

I confess. Every couple of months, I go to Sam’s Club. I take my list, grit my teeth and try to blow through the place in 15 minutes, not looking at the deck furniture on sale for $299, or the leather jackets for $49. I head straight for the toilet paper, the cheese, biscotti and occasionally break down and buy Michaelangelo’s Eggplant Parmagian.

(I’ve reconciled Michelangelo's poor treatment of immigrant workers with the rationale that if I boycott their product, the workers will be unemployed, so either way I’m damned.)

I race down the aisle and see an open cashier. One man is finishing his transaction. Oh joy, oh joy. I unload my cart, noting that I have only bought one unnecessary item - the forty spears of asparagus. It will be a race against time to eat them all, but Earth Fare charges $10 for a tiny bunch in season….

My cashier is ignoring me. She is deeply in conversation with another cashier. Periodically, they look at the floor, murmuring. Have I become invisible? I clear my throat. She ignores me. I drum my fingers on the conveyor belt. Slowly, a stream of white liquid starts oozing from behind the cash register on the floor. The two cashiers stare at it. She looks at me. “Got a spill.” Yeah, and?

A supervisor appears and they have more earnest debate. He runs off and I hear an announcement. “Clean up spill at register six.” Now of course, if my judgement had not become clouded from dodging 80 year old women in ultraviolet eye shadow offering me unidentifiable oozing samples of fast food and couples arguing over garden hose and clematis bulbs, I might have moved to another line. But I stood there, mesmerized by the spill. Finally one cashier said to the other, slowly, as if pondering a great truth, “Maybe you should use the paper towels.” The other bent down and produced a roll of paper towels. Slowly, as if she lived in another temporal dimension, she bent down and began tearing paper towels off the roll, placing them like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle inside the spill. She looked up at me and said, “If they see me now, they’ll think I did it !”

Still I wait, rooted to my spot, as other lines move, customers pay and leave. The cashier stands up. “Um, are you going to ring me up?” She stares. She thinks. And finally:

“Don’t see how I can. Got a spill.” She begins to put my items back in my cart.
I’ve exceeded my Sam’s Club time limit. I feel a kind of insane seething building in me. The injustice! The stupidity! This place sucks! Why, I could just leave my cart and storm out of here. There is nothing of life importance here. I’ve just poisoned my soul with this toxic atmosphere! I stare at my bag of bargain lemons, my 64 oz. of Era Detergent and slowly get on another line.

In front of me a couple bickers. The wife, in frizzy perm and painted on eyebrows grabs a box out of her chubby husband’s hands. “Just let me load the belt and don’t argue. I am so sleep deprived right now, anything will set me off.” He leans on the handle of his cart and looks up at me. His face is raw, as if he shaved with a dull razor. There is food in the corner of his mouth. I do not want eye contact. I want to be abducted and taken to another planet, right now, please lord! He smiles at me and says, in a thick accent, “It only seems like forever.”

My senses, dulled from the last encounter, cannot comprehend him. “What?”

“I said, it only seems like forever. You will get out of this store, it’s not that bad.”
I wonder what my face must have betrayed. I shrug. “It’s a long story.”
He gestures to the pile of groceries on the belt. “I got time.”

“Oh it’s nothing. It’s just that I was at another register and had all my stuff out and they closed the register.”

He looks shocked. He grabs his wife. “Did you hear that honey? They closed the register on her!”

She looks at me. “What? As you got there?”

He interrupts. “NO! She already had her things out of the cart.”

Her eyes widen. “Oh, no, that’s not good. Unacceptable. I won’t stand for that.”

I’m a little intimidated. I find myself saying, “Well, it’s not that bad.”

“Not that bad! I mean, there you were, standing there, waiting, while other customers who were behind you on other lines were leaving, right?”

I nod weakly. Her husband chimes in. “And then you had to take everything off the conveyor belt and put it BACK in your cart. Can you believe it?’

She is now livid. “That means that people who were behind you in line got out of here first. Oh, no, call the supervisor. They’re going to hear from me.”

“No, no, that’s OK!” Suddenly, my dilemma seems minor compared to an argument between strangers and a Sam’s Club supervisor on my behalf.

“My fuse is really short right now,” she growls. “I’ve had seven hours’ sleep in 3 days. My tolerance is gone.” She turns to her husband who’s playing with a food item. “Put that down!” she barks. She turns to me, “And I have to deal with him on top of it.”
She’s so angry at my predicament that I’ve lost all my steam. In fact, I want to start convincing her that it’s really OK. That I really don’t mind. That things happen, and that there’s no one to blame. Anything, to get her to stop. As she pays she says to the cashier, “Now, you be good to her. She’s having a bad Sam’s Club experience.” As I handed my Sam’s Club card to the cashier, her husband says, “See, I told you it only seems like forever.”

As I wheel my cart through the parking lot a van door opens and a voice yells, “Did everything go OK?” It’s the frizzy headed woman.
“Yes, yes, thank you.”

“Good, ‘cause if it didn’t, I’d have been ready to wallop ‘em for you,” she grins.
As I drive home, I’m smiling. These clownish people had somehow defused my rage. And that was when it struck me—they had actually embodied the principles of Aikido, the martial art called by its founder, The Art Of Peace. Aikidoists receive the energy of the attacker, blend with it, then use that same energy to disarm. I’ve studied aikido for 9 years, working to understand this movement of energy, landing on the floor thousands of times. But I have never seen such a skillful use of the principle in life. This odd couple had received my negativity and used it to support me, effectively changing my direction.

Moshe Feldenkrais, founder of The Feldenkrais MethodÆ and a black belt in judo used this same principle in his work with others. He called it “supporting the habit.” When someone comes to see me with tension in the shoulder for example, I might hold her shoulder up for her. Her shoulder (and her nervous system) receive the message that something else is doing the work, and for a moment, it lets go. When that couple started yelling for the supervisor, they were holding up my rage and I no longer needed to sustain my righteous indignation.

When I am stuck in a pattern, I am unable to see a way out. Whether it is a physical pattern of pain, an emotional pattern of negativity or a habit I can’t shake, like smoking or overeating. But when someone can enter, receive my behavior and reflect it back to me in a non-threatening manner, I can see my own folly and begin the process of changing direction. I may fall down a couple of times but hopefully my partner will be compassionate. One of Feldenkrais’ definitions of maturity was to not be afraid of falling. Hmmmm.

Lavinia Plonka is a movement junkie. She spent 25 years performing and teaching mime around the world from the lofty heights of the Guggenheim Museum to the dubious distinction of being dubbed NYC’s “bar mitzvah queen”. Yoga, Aikido, Nia and The Feldenkrais Method® form her current course of study. Lavinia teaches The Feldenkrais Method privately and with groups in Asheville, as well as workshops nationwide. Her new book, What Are You Afraid Of? A Body/Mind Guide to Courageous Living (Tarcher/Penguin) will hit book stores April 12.
[ laviniaplonka.com ]