The time for kindness

I do not have what most people would call "a strong personality."

Distinctive, yes. Unique, probably.

My friend Evan often describes me as "a girl whose axis is on a tilt." (cue group sing-along of this epic song)

Strong, though? Not in the way this culture defines that word.

Yesterday, the sangha continued reading the new book by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, The Shambhala Principle. Full disclosure: I haven't read this book beyond what we've discussed as a group at the center, but I've got a pretty good sense of what he's talking about from the bit I've read, and it's really resonating with me so far.

Grouches like hugs, too

We're living in a time when the majority of humanity is suffering from sickness. Our politicians are obsessed with power, and it's making us sick. We're obsessed with technology-- so much that we have become confused about what is real  and what is constructed (hint: it all is), and it's making us sick. Our food comes from hurt, and it's making us sick (literally). We value industry over environment, and it's making us sick. We value money over meaning, and it's making us sick. Sickness everywhere.

But most of all, we've lost touch with ourselves. We have lost faith in our basic goodness, as a species.  We get bombarded with stories of violence, every day, at every angle. We believe that when we are angry, we are showing our "true selves" and "aggressiveness" is something to be rewarded. Anger and aggressiveness are emotions that are "strong."

This is not an anti-society rant. This is not even one of my anti-technology rants (though I do love to have those). This is a call-- a plea-- to begin curing ourselves.

We have the antidote to this sickness. Humanity is at a crossroads-- it all comes down to a choice, and it begins with one simple action:

Be kind.

Be kind to each other. And be kind to yourself.

I know I sound a little nuts-- do I really believe we can save the world by being more kind? Yes. Absolutely. It's simple, but it's not easy.

Here's where I want to challenge our society's notion of what it means to be strong. It takes strength to be kind. It''s easy to be aggressive and unaccommodating. It's easy to just be totally pissed off all the time. It's easy to be in a hurry, to be too busy to care.  Those emotions allow us to build a wall around ourselves-- we don't have to think about anyone else in the world.

Be excellent to each other!

Kindness is hard. Random acts of kindness are often not received well. People don't think they deserve kindness, and so they're skeptical when someone gives it out for free. At best, we'll get called naive or maybe crazy. At worst, we will be on the receiving end of some anger.  But don't let that stop you.

Be kind and without becoming attached to a particular outcome (this is what my yogi friends call "karma yoga".) Be kind without desire for reciprocity. One simple, random and even silly act of compassion is enough. Kindness is one of those great things-- by making someone else feel better, we feel better ourselves. 

It was one of the first life lessons I learned from psychology-- if you want to like someone, do them a favor. If you want more kindness in your life, be kind to others. 

Go pass out flowers in the park. Buy a stranger's coffee. Tip really well (and write a haiku on the receipt). Smile at someone who looks lonely. You'll feel silly, sure, but you'll also feel better, I promise.

The time 10 years seemed like 10 minutes, and 10 minutes lasted forever.

Today was hard.

I woke up at 3am with this feeling of anxiety. It's been happening a lot recently, and I've been embracing it as a sort of early-morning reminder to keep breathing.

Sometimes, life seems to get way ahead of me. I forget to eat. I forget to breathe.

The best part of my day is spent conjuring up inspiration. Just taking a moment to imagine what the world could be like.

I maintained this practice of imagining possible futures when I was in high school. I did it so often, in fact, that it became really difficult for me to imagine anything further than 2 weeks in the future because I had opened the door of all possibilities. At any given moment, I could imagine at least 6 possible futures.  What if... yes, but what if....

These days, I have to make space to imagine things. Inspiration has to be set as an intention every morning. I want to say the world is rougher than it was when I was in high school, but really I know that's not true.

The truth is, I am.

10 years ago I ran the Boston Marathon. I was coming off of 6 months of intense training, and 4 weeks of touring around Italy (my first of many European adventures). I was about to graduate, and completely unable to imagine anything about my future. Nothing was certain, but everything was happening. I felt like I was going over a waterfall-- I was completely out of control.

In addition to all the stress of being a high school senior, 26.2 miles is nothing to sneeze at either. They say some crazy things happen to your brain when your body is under that kind of stress.  You might think that after a while the physical pain would pass, but it never really does. It just becomes less and less shocking.  It was amidst this consistent discomfort that I had a really major breakthrough about the fragile nature of humanity.

Weird. I know. Let me explain:

I was about halfway through the race, when I suddenly started running toward (what I thought) was the nearest T station. Eventually, I coaxed back on course by my running buddy, who assured me that my parents would be waiting for me at the finish line in a few hours. I kept running on course, but I couldn't shake this feeling. The feeling that pulled me away from my path was the realization that life is beautiful and fragile and fleeting.

Life is Beautiful. Fragile. Fleeting.

This was no passing thought. It completely overwhelmed me. It consumed me. I realized that I only had a few years to be alive, and yet it could so easily be wasted with illusions of "doing something more important." 

(What if.... What if... )

Finishing that race, 6th form formal, graduation, college, graduation, grad school, job... it all flashed before my eyes in a dull blur.  I wanted no part in these "important things." Every single moment is an eternity, filled with possibility. Why was I wasting my time running a race?

What if... what if life is actually something other than all these things?  

I finished the race. The pain stopped. I lost all my toenails (ew).  But that desire to veer off the path completely remained. It's still here.

When bad things happen, it seems like all the suffering of the world is pouring down on us. Pain is scary. It's incredibly sad. It is also really important to explore. Today, a bomb went off at a wedding in Afghanistan. A car bomb exploded in Baghdad. LAPD probably shot someone a few miles from here. And yes, bombs went off in downtown Boston, in the very same area where my family stood waiting for me to cross the finish line 10 years ago.

I'm writing this post as a reminder of the importance of pain, fear and discomfort. It shocks us into examining what is truly important. It forces us awake, shakes us into looking at what we actually are, and what we actually could become. From this space of fear and discomfort, we can examine our possible futures. What path are we on? What world are we living in? What kind of world could we live in?  

What if?

This is a challenge to see the world as it is. It is a challenge to see the world as it could be.

Imagine with me, for a moment.

And then let's get to work.

The time I was stuck on the 405 and thought about the future

Los Angeles is a city of extremes. Even after being here for half a year, there are times when I'm still blown away by its duplicity-- the rich hiding away in their mansions, and everyone else below them, struggling to either get there or at least just survive; the striking natural beauty of the mountains and the ocean, brushing up against the cold cement industrialization.

I was stuck in traffic on the 405, on my way to a school in the Valley, when I decided to take a moment and look around out my window. These mountains that look like perfect cardboard cut-outs, stuck to the horizon and looming over the foothills of lush green, all juxtaposed against the immense, sprawling concrete of this place-- they all serve as a constant and beautiful reminder that humans are just a blip on the radar. Someday our structures will all be underwater, or underground. And who knows where we'll be.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine a few days ago about this idea people have of "saving the earth". The truth is-- and I know this sounds odd coming from an environmental activist like myself-- I actually don't think the earth needs saving.

This is what concerns me most about the group I like to call the Leave it Alone Skeptic. They're the ones who almost sound like environmentalists--  They know something's up, they may even admit that humans are causing it. But any action we take as a population is too risky and ultimately pointless because the earth can heal itself.

It seems like we somewhat agree. The primary difference is that I believe that while the earth will continue to adapt, new species will evolve and all the old patterns and species will fade away, and I don't view humans to be above this at all. When I tell students that over the next century we're predicting 20-50% of species to be headed toward extinction, I'm not excluding humans from that statistic. As much as we want to convince ourselves that we are the master manipulators of science, biology and even evolution, the fact remains that we are still animals, dependent on the earth's conditions to remain constant.