Do what you said you would do, right?

For years Forall had been stressing the significance of integrity to the group. “Do what you said you would do” was often how he put it. He would stress that if you don’t follow through on a commitment, it will rot your soul. This had become such a central teaching that we had made it into an acronym “DWYSYWD” (dwee-see-wood).

It took us a long time to come to the point where we could reliably expect each other to uphold this standard of ethics. This is excellent and we should celebrate this level of integrity, Forall noted.

So it was strange when in the 12th year of training at the Monastic Academy, I was in a leadership meeting where Forall said, “You can’t just do what you said you would do. That would be ridiculous.”

For context, a few months earlier, we had been clear with a training resident that if they continued to allow their thoughts and emotions to significantly impact their responsibilities, then they would be removed from the role and shifted into another position. So when this person had another particularly challenging day, leadership was strongly considering whether it was time to do just that.

When discussing whether we should remove this training resident from their position, I expressed concerns. Forall understood my concerns and on several occasions, both in person and via email, said to leadership, “take your time” in considering this and “has this conversation received the attention it deserves?” He asked us to carefully consider the implications of this decision both on the individual and the entire community.

Despite these messages, the next day, our professional development lead met with the person and told them that they would be removed from their position.

Forall was disappointed to learn that this had happened. So when we met as a team to discuss the situation, he once again said, “You can’t just do what you said you would do. That would be ridiculous.”

He continued, “You should definitely do what you said you would do, but don’t just do what you said you would do.”

As Forall often does when he wants to make a point to the whole community, he brought this situation up in an exhortation amidst our final awakening week of the training season.

He said, “There is a purpose to the explicit, but the explicit must be used by something that is not explicit. That's the reason that I often do not follow the rules. That's right. I don't follow the rules. Just to prove to you that the rules are not the master who makes the rules.”

“Recently, as some of you know, leadership took some actions and I criticized those choices. I said that was the wrong thing to do, and leadership disagreed. They said, but that's what we said we would do. We said that if this happens, we'll do this. That happened, and so we did that. I said, you can't just do it because you said you would do it.”

“You can't just do something because you said you would do it. You have to have wisdom. You can't just be trapped by your own structures, and yet you have to respect your structures. This seems confusing to a dualistic mind of conceptual grasping. But there's nothing confusing about it. It's only confusing if you're trapped in a mind of conceptual grasping. Once we get out of that mind, the wisdom overflows, and it cannot be fit into words.”