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.