A Compassionate Pause

Recent events have once more put me in a place where the practice of mindfulness has very much become an ally, and I feel compelled to scribe a little piece about the value and importance of compassion. Let’s face it there's always a place and a time for this.

I’m reading a book which some of you may have heard of, called “The Book of Joy”. Maybe some of you will have read it, in which case (even though I’m only part way through it) good for you! If you haven’t (even though I’m only part way through it) I recommend it. It’s a meeting of minds between old friends the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, together with author Douglas Abrams, the latter member also somewhat involved in the discussions. In fact it was a point which he himself raised between them which caught my mind. He mentioned almost casually a lab experiment involving eighteen month old children who were shown dolls facing one another versus others who were shown dolls facing away from one another. The former group were more cooperative than the latter, which arguably demonstrated that cooperation is a deep evolutionary drive which exists in our earliest development. In concert with the Dalai Lama’s assertion in other texts that our continued presence here today after so many millennia is likely due to a natural disposition for cooperation and compassion, rather than aggression and conflict, lead me to ponder our present social situations in a general sense.

On the same morning I was also engaged in conversation with a handful of friends over matters of immigration. It became evident once again that matters of practical mindfulness are as equally important to awareness of actual political facts if not more so, the latter of which can be fraught with objective corruption through to irresponsible reporting. In fact one of the people I was conversing with admitted that they didn’t really understand the political scene that easily, and who can blame them? It really is a quagmire of chaos, and I personally believe (as I stated in the chat) that we are in the midst of a fight of considerable magnitude when compared to the general impression given by the media, an information world war if you will - somewhat ironic when I think of us all living through the background fear of matters more nuclear. This is why I would implore people to embrace some responsibility and shrink the chaos we live with down to something manageable by meditating (in the sense of reasoned contemplation) upon those same natural, core instincts which the children mentioned above displayed.

Whilst I hesitate to broadly call the media out on “fake news”, a particularly reprehensible act when issued from those demonstrable sociopaths in our midst (no names mentioned), such problems whether inadvertently misinformed or purposefully fabricated are very real, and bring a destructive chaos to our efforts. What is undeniable however is the power of stepping back and looking deep into the heart of any matter with a sense of right minded compassion and empathy. Again, given my current circumstances I can assure you that these senses are currently quite tuned within myself and it was whilst I was engaged in this debate that the truth of such an approach became obvious. As I considered those children, free from complicated ego and social indoctrination, so too does this point to the validity of our own efforts as adults to undo those irksome habits in exchange for positive and clear mindsets. We all have a base sense of right from wrong which I would argue are influenced by real life experience even in the absence of parenting - the latter usually brings those lessons with a tempered kindness. By taking the time to allow ourselves some space when engaged in connection with others, tolerance to help us filter our knee-jerk emotions to feelings of confrontation, compassion rather than admonishment (for ourselves and others) when we fail to prevent our own vengeful reactions to verbal/actual conflict, we can take an active hand in creating better dialogue and actions. We can make clearer progress on a level where so many leaders, political and otherwise, bring little except shame in their “profitable” rhetoric. If so many of them cannot be trusted to demonstrate virtue then it really is up to us, as members of communities both virtual and tangible, to take the lead and smooth our own rhetoric into something worthy of the tools of communication at our disposal.

The Deepest Cuts

It seems that this four week holiday I have before me at the time of writing, the timing of it, is no coincidence. Mortality and suffering is at the heart of it and so I suppose my first responsibility to myself is to be compassionate, since all I can do is resign myself to the truth that it is not seemingly going to be the restful one I expected it to be when I booked it a couple of months ago.

Many of you reading will not be aware that I lost my half brother about three weeks ago under lamentable circumstances which I won't dwell upon here. My father is going into hospital for the day, a relatively minor operation on the morning of writing this, and in spite of recent CT scan results my girlfriend and I have what I believe to be around a 90% chance of facing the return of her cancer, which we have been in combat with since summer 2016. It seems that life is not being fair at the moment and I find myself working hard to remind myself that there is no fair or right and wrong in life without a mind lazy enough to qualify such platitudes. There is no point asking why or how this happens, only the will to see these things through. As you might imagine I am both succeeding and failing in this respect, a pretty normal state I think in life for us all. To have some parts of your life suddenly wrenched away and others taken a piece at a time is mind numbing to say the least. Yet it is remarkable to me that the strength to surf these events exists at all. Being a spectator to it all is a horribly humbling and guilt laden experience. There's no wonder that such things leave people, both spectator and participant feeling victimised and set up. This is perhaps the lesson for us all - to realise that if there is no fate or preordained unfolding, only the cause and effect of life, that there can be no stronger evidence that we should have compassion for one another at all times. Dwelling upon this may serve to make you aware or keep you mindful of the pain which we all experience on a daily basis by avoiding or denying our interconnectedness. Whether you choose to accept and embrace that pain as a means to justifying your personal effort to set aside anger in favour of understanding and compassion is a point of meditation I want to leave with you via this little insight.

It's often said that we know little of other people's battles. I personally cannot find anything to better express this notion than in the sharing of this moment in my life and I'm sure I'm not alone in such a scenario. My wish is not a generic platitude, but a very directed one. Love one another more - not because you never know what is around the corner.. many people pass that meme around. I want you to love and have compassion for one another because it is a choice. You have freedom of choice every day. The only freedom you do not have in life is freedom from the consequences of those choices, which is why I implore you to choose well. So many people rant at some form of fate instead of realising that the choice remains with you as a person to live intentionally, positively irrespective of the unknowable. Don't live well with compassion because you don't know what's coming, live well with compassion because the power rests with you and those around you to make things better in spite of the unknowable, by sheer force of will. This is what makes those who live in ivory towers so despicable and cowardly to me, yet I recognise that they too are not free from suffering, but seem to be in a losing fight to block it out with money and power, ignorant of their self harm as well as harm to others. We can all do better. My simple hope and calling to you out there is to choose what is right. You know what that is, under all the layers of bias, under all the rhetoric. Without compassion and empathy we are nothing. That is the gift inside life itself. Don't squander or deny it.