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A self-portrait taken at Leopold's in Mumbai, with daughter Kate and Carl Lindquist. I am in the moment and in the picture. |
Schilphol Airport, Netherlands ~
As we flew west, we pushed back against the time zones. Our journey from Mumbai to Memphis, including a seven-hour stopover here, is 25 hours for us. But since we left India at 1 a.m. and expect to arrive in Memphis at 5 p.m. on the same day, the time on the ground -- and on my watch -- is 16 hours. For nine hours, then, we existed only on airplanes.
And if time itself is relative, then what isn’t? As I re-read my first blog post about my existential angst and my frustrations, I find my problems, such as they are, are pretty damn relative, too. It’s too easy, and a bit facile, to say that I am blessed to be a world-traveling university professor with good friends and a wonderful family and not a polio-paralyzed beggar asking strangers for small change in the Haridawar train station.
What I take away, at least for the moment, is that most of those confusing, vexing existential questions don’t matter, and neither do any answers I can come up with to address them. That’s because the questions are unanswerable and the answers can only be vague attempts to put structure on that which is beyond my understanding. Or anybody else’s for that matter.
What does matter, then, is … just being. For three weeks, I was, mostly, in a state of satori, the Buddhist idea of being “in the moment.” Americans call it going with the flow. I didn’t think too much about bills or my job, about my past or my future. It’s a concept that transcends cultures, In Swahili, they call it “hakuna matata,” or “no worries, and, yes, I know they used it in Disney’s “The Lion King.”
It also underlies the “serenity prayer,” usually attributed to Reinhold Neibuhr: “Give me the strength to change the things I can change, the grace the accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to tell the difference between the two.” If you are in a state of satori, you are dealing with the things you can affect. It’s automatic.
One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that life entails suffering, and there is no way to avoid it. Furthermore, Buddhism teaches that most sadness and suffering comes from human desire and the central challenge in human existence is learning to deal with one’s desires.
The idea is consistent with the teachings if Christianity. Jesus teaches that the first commandments are the most important: putting God first, and loving your neighbor before yourself. If you’re dealing with God and your neighbors, you’re not dwelling on your own desires.
India is a place and a culture that embodies that attitude, since Indian spawned Buddhism, and the Hindu culture on which Buddhism is based later re-absorbed its teachings in a Hindu “reformation” on the middle ages. Modern India is a mess. It’s disorganized, chaotic and corrupt. But it’s also very friendly and weirdly happy. People of different castes, religions, ethnicities and cultures get along, mostly, in a big, messy democracy. The culture accepts its messiness, maybe too much, but it’s also modernizing, growing and finding a balance with its desires and its realities.
Maybe I need to do that, too. As I look back on my first post, the angst I described is about desire, a desire for advancement and to move forward. Like India and the Indian people, I need to accept some of my own chaos, accept that the universe is beyond my control or understanding, and just do a better job just rolling with it all. And if I am doing that, I am indeed moving forward. I don’t think anybody can ask for more.
Namaste.
