Connections

Someone a few years back made a picture frame for me that said "Ambassador of Goodwill". What a wonderful sentiment. I say that not because I am special but because I want everyone who comes in contact with "me" to come away a little richer. We can all be ambassadors of goodwill. We can all be instruments of peace and love. If we are not here to love and enrich each others lives, then what are we here for?

For me, going to run errands has taken on new meaning. The grocery store is filled with opportunities to connect with the world's wonderful denizen. The connection does not have to be much, most of the time its just a beaming smile, but I look to feel the essence of each individual I meet. I look to meet them as a field of compassionate space that says we are all notes in this this wonderful symphony called life. We are all so precious. We are all here so briefly. Consciousness has chosen us to express itself and it is beautiful each and every time. Why not discover that someone masquerading as a person next to you. The funny thing about it is that I come away with so much energy from these encounters. There is synergy when souls connect by playing together in the world of form.

I have been spending a lot of time looking for employment. It can be dim. There are hours in front of the computer pouring over job sites and writing applications. Sometimes I schedule some of these errands and I watch my whole energy system change. The other day at the grocery store, I struck up a wonderful conversation with an "elderly" gentleman. I was standing not quite clearly in line and he entered the line not really seeing me. I let him go ahead and a little while later he asked if he had cut ahead. I said not at all. He then noticed a display of eggs on sale and we wondered together whether they would be cheaper than the one's he had in his cart. I remember being filled with so much joy just standing there next to this man and chatting. He paid for his things and thanked me in front of the cashier for letting him go ahead in the line. The cashier responded we have such nice people in our store.

Well, we are all like that. We all want happiness. We all want connection and love. Several days later the fates were reversed when a woman went out of her way to help me figure out how to negotiate the computerized parking attendant.

It is easy to think that because we read about so much hurt and pain, that people are hateful or evil but that is just the easy way out. We want to write people off because then we don't have to face the depth of the grief that is before us when people commit horrible acts. Our hearts want to close down in the face of such pain. We can pretend that "those" people just are in another category that is not like us. In reality they are like us but for which seeds have been watered. They are just unconscious. When someone is so constricted internally that they believe they will acheive happiness by inflicting pain on someone else, it is deeply sad. It is sad for both the "victim" and the "perpetrator". I call your attention to an absolutely beautiful poem by Thich Nhat Hanh that gracefully captures that tension of our interconnectedness called "Please Call Me By My True Names"

There is only one. Its like all of life is one breathing, pulsing organism, with different parts making up one body. One person is a leg, another an liver, another still a lung, but we all are part of the same oneness. Without each other we would not thrive. We are all looking to connect with each other. Can you sense your connectedness to "other" manifestations of that oneness? Breathe deeply and tell me what your heart says? Tell me a story about when and where you felt connected. It will probably make you feel good.

You Don't Talk On Metro

The other day I was coming home on the metro after going downtown for a job interview. I was sitting in my seat reading Happiness Is An Inside Job by Sylvia Boorstein when a woman in her mid forties came and sat in an adjacent seat next to a young man fresh from college. At first the young man was listening to his mp3 player and jamming to his tunes. After a few minutes though, he decided to engage the young woman in conversation. In the metro, as a rule, strangers do not talk to each other. There is a metro decorum which says remain in your own little world and do not engage the other passengers. At first, because he had broken the decorum, I thought that the two of them knew each other, but when she responded by saying " "You must be new here, don't you know that people don't talk on the metro", I knew that they were strangers. I smiled and paused, alert like a cat watching a mouse hole to see how this exchange would go. The young man however, did not give up, he continued by saying "no, that can't be true" and repeated his question about how her day was. By now the woman was smiling too. He was serious in his attempt to be friendly. They began to talk. Soon they caught me smiling and observing them and the three of us engaged in a very pleasant conversation.


As all of this transpired, some other passengers began to smile too. It was not quite like what happens here: but it was interesting to observe. At one point the two asked me what I was reading and what it was about and I found myself in a discussion about cultivating happiness internally rather than looking to external circumstances to provide it.

I even mentioned that we are not our stories or our reactions or anything else that we can name and found myself talking about how we often respond to events from a place of our particular conditioning not from the expansiveness that we are. We chatted more, talking about our jobs (or former jobs) and where we lived and eventually the woman departed and said goodbye to the both of us. Eventually I got off too.

We never even learned each others names but we shared a wonderful connection that day. That connection exists all the time with everything if you take the space to be aware of it. But most of the time we are operating from our conditioned responses. " Its not ok to engage other passengers" "I must remain in my own world" "S/he will think I am coming onto them if I say something" We do not allow ourselves to feel our oneness or let it drive our actions. We do not see that we are created anew in each and every moment, as is the rest of the world. We operate as if what we did a moment ago, governs what we must do now. How freeing would it be if we realized deeply that we are reborn each moment and that it is only our mind which conjures the illusion of continuity. We do not have to brush someone off on the metro when they start talking to us just because that is what is done on metro. A new world awaits us.

How lovely it was to watch the young man crack the shell of our conditioning and remind us that we are all in this new world together.