The Gray Area
Life’s not black and white. I heard this a lot growing up. Arguments with adults often ended in not everything is fair or the famous do as I say, not as I do. Now, as an adult, I see that the phrase was at some point contorted. It should read Life is grey. Now that I got that out, it sounds like ‘life is depressing’ but you know what I’m getting at here.
Today I went deep into the gray.
I have a tendency to ignore things that I don’t like until they drive me so crazy that I snap. If things that I don’t like are personality traits in another person, I just get to a point where I say I don’t want to be around that person. If they are characteristics or habits of a teacher, I will just break the relationship off and stop my lessons. This inability to speak my mind has gotten me into trouble before and it got me into trouble today.
Here are the details. I started taking lessons with a teacher, and during the first lesson, I found her pretty intense. Kind of dramatic in the way that I used to be dramatic. She was super nice, but kind of… too much friendly, not enough professional. Also, I found that I wasn’t understanding what she was telling me about posture. It just didn’t seem to be jiving with the posture work I had done. But for some reason, I ignored these nagging red flags.. I had expectations (judging from how long she had been teaching and the fact that she was also a teacher of a self development course that I had done) that she was worth whatever oddities she came with. At the end of the lesson, the next student came into her living room and then, I suppose my lesson was over. There was no one on one talk about how to continue etc. So, dispite my discomfort, and these observations I was deluding myself into ignoring, I signed on for four classes.
That day she calls and asks me if I am sure I would like to go on with the lessons. I said yes (clearly still in denial)!
Flash forward to now. I’ve gone to my second lesson, found it to be equally as unprofessional as she started my lesson late due to her necessary coffee, then ended it right as the other student came in, right after my last exercise. No closing comments, no nothing. I have returned home to try and practice. I’m frustrated. I don’t feel like I know what I should know. All at once, the nagging red flags come forward and I decide that I need to quit. I need to find a new teacher. So, I write her an email (she decided last week that she needed a week off, so she cancelled this weeks lesson) because I didn’t want to disturb her week off (maybe I was actually scared of the difficult conversation?) I wrote that I felt that these lessons weren’t a good fit for me, and I was wondering if she wouldn’t mind refunding the rest of my lessons.
She wrote back and said, in summary, that the lessons were not refundable. She stated that in the 39 years she had been teaching, she had never had a student want a refund. (Ego, hit). If I would like to discuss my concerns, then I could do so.
I didn’t want to discuss my concerns. I felt that my opnions of her were really irrelevant to the situation and that really, if the relationship wasn’t working for me then I should find a different teacher. I wrote back and said that I would finish out my classes and that it was just not a good fit for me, that was all. I probably should have followed my intuition after the first lesson.
Then I was irritated. All day I felt uneasy about having to pay for these lessons that I didn’t want to take. What teacher in their right mind would want to teach a student who plainly did not want to learn from her? I suddenly realized that it said nowhere on her website that the fees were nonrefundable. I wrote her an email outlining my uneasiness and asking for her to point me to where I should have read this before I signed on the dotted line. (Note: Lawyer tactic – trying to get out of something on a technicality… remember, life is grey. Not black. Not white.)
I sent the email and then conferred with my husband. He said that he would have to side with her, I made the call at the first lesson and it was my own fault if I didn’t want to continue. I should have tried a second lesson before I got into it so deeply. All true. I felt bad. I felt like in a way I was right, and then…. in another way I was all wrong. I was right in the black and white sense, but in the gray sense. I was wrong.
We decided that the right thing to do was for me to call her and tell her that she is right, it was my responsibility to make a more thorough assessment before I committed, and that I would forfeit the money. Lesson learned. There was the possibility of telling her exactly what bothered me from the very beginning, but I realized that that would have been okay had I refused to continue from the beginning, but after going to two lessons, agreeing to ignore her eccentricities and then not ignore them? I was being just as unprofessional as she was!
I called her and said the above. She offered to pay me anyway and seemed to want to have the difficult conversation. I held my ground and said that it was nothing personal, my learning style just didn’t work with her teaching style. I said that she was completely in the right to keep the money and that I was okay with it, but she insisted. She said she would call me in three weeks to arrange to get me the money and ended the conversation.
Gray. But I realize that black and white never touch except in the gray. Gray is a coming together of black and white. I think part of the reason I am on this planet is to learn how to come together with others without hurting them, bruising their ego or creating karma for myself. This was a pretty messy first try, but it came out way better than I expected in the end.