Anyhow, today in the bathroom, Pema Chodron quoted Albert Einstein as saying,
A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest-- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
I particularly like Einstein's opening depiction of human beings here. We are temporal phenomenon that occupy a defined amount of space just as any other thing in our observable universe. Redwoods live for millennia, stars for a few billion years, insects for weeks or months. Our timeline is about a century if we are of excellent health. We are lucky to have sense organs to perceive our universe, and a very complicated brain to try to make sense of it, even if our attempts are inadequate.
And yet, fully knowing we have this timeline, recognizing our sheer good luck to be motile and have eyes and ears and gray matter, so much of our lives are spent living unconsciously, slaves of our desires and reactions to things we like and don't like, feeling sorry for ourselves or angry with the world, lost in our personal pain, numbing and distracting ourselves. I have spent a fair amount of my waking hours in the past couple of decades this way, though I can't speak for the rest of you.
So Einstein's task, "to widen the circle of understanding and compassion" to eventually encompass the entirety of the universe, while daunting, seems important and not something just to try to do between episodes of Mad Men. How to go about doing this, though, is a completely different thing.
To give myself a place to start, I try to do so with other human beings, a few dogs and cats that I know, and an occasional bamboo or cactus plant that I am trying not to kill. The particularly fun thing about trying to understand and have compassion for other human beings is that we share overlapping timelines and can potentially spend years together trying to understand one another. There is also the fact that we are rapidly changing and things that I may have understood (or misunderstood) about you 5 years ago may not hold true to you today, and I have to re-discover who you are all over again.
The thing that is hardest, but the most rewarding, ultimately, is the part of compassion that requires you to enter someone else's world, completely. Last month I was at a community organizing training, and Sister Judy was teaching the piece on how to do a relational meeting. We were put in pairs and she coached us as we tried to be attentive, be curious, discover who the other person was, try to get a glimpse of what stirs them, what has made them who they are. And oh yeah, to do it in 20-30 minutes. In a demonstration for us, Sister Judy sat with a trainee from Long Beach. I don't know how to describe it quickly, but in essence, because Sister Judy was asking the right kind of questions, and being still, and being unshake-able, she pretty much completely entered, for a few brief minutes, the woman from Long Beach's world. And that world was filled with pain, trauma and violence-- domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, but also with power, recovery, anger, resilience.
Most of the time, we walk around being polite to each other, keeping our scars hidden. And if someone does happen to break down (or break open) in front of us, a fear can arise about what to do--we get agitated, we want to fix or resolve whatever is troubling them, we want them to get over it if it happened a long time ago, we want them to get up and keep going. Or we want to run away. We don't want to fall off the cliff with them. We don't want to quake in their shoes as the frightened child they may have once been.
I don't know who said it-- someone important and quoteable, no doubt-- but I've been thinking a lot about the idea that courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to keep taking action even if it scares the shit out of you.
I think it takes courage and resolve to have understanding and compassion. Compassion is not for lightweights and dilettantes. You've got to free fall, even if for only a few seconds, with someone else. And sometimes you can relate-- oh yeah, I also quaked in fear a lot as a child-- and sometimes you can't immediately, but you can imagine it happening to yourself, whatever it might be. And if you stick around long enough, you'll start to see other things about the person that neither or you had seen before. And you'll see things in yourself that you had never seen before.
I think a prerequisite for going around having compassion for others is to start with yourself, with your own being, bound by time and space. To stick around with yourself when things are getting rough and dirty. To hold the hand of the child in you that might have gotten hurt at some point. To cheer on the rebellious teenager. To comfort the broken-hearted in you. It takes a lot of work, and it can't be done all at once. Maybe 30 minutes a day, or 5 minutes, or a few breaths here and there. Courage comes this way, and it opens up space in our head to be with others, to allow ourselves to be encumbered by their lives and experiences. But you can't just wallow in your pain and others' pain. You've got to move with them, you've got to run or walk alongside them.
I think the 1/2 marathon training I am doing with APLA is also trying to help us do this-- runners, donors, everyone, to enter the world of someone who is living with HIV/AIDS and free fall for a while, and then run with them.
More on the concept of "running with someone" tomorrow, part 3 of the series! And perhaps a little bit about tribalism and its strengths and limitations. Or maybe a whole new topic. Now off to do some groceries.
Make a donation, nothing to fear!!!!!!!!!! :)
http://apla.convio.net/goto/surya
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