So, what does care look like in the presence of difficulty? I think we can safely say that we all care, but are we caring about the right things? These are the words of Hafiz, a poet from antiquity: “My dear, is it true that your mind is sometimes like a battering ram, running all through the city, shouting so madly inside and out about the 10,000 things that do not matter?”
I think we all have moments in our lives that wake us up to what matters most. I have one: when my son Valentino was about a month old, I had to rush him to the hospital. It’s there that we learned he needed emergency surgery. It wasn’t even me running into that hospital with him—it was every parent who ever carried their sick child or sick baby. It’s easy to forget in those moments that what we’re actually doing is learning something about this human condition.
How do we train the heart to relax so we can learn about this phenomenon of being human? And how do we make it less about our individual pain, but connect instead to THE pain, and all the beings who share…
