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Being human is not a simple thing. We come into these bodies, into this world, with no skills whatsoever. Anything we may have picked up in past lives of necessity forgotten. Many of us end up with parents who know next to nothing about child-rearing, and whose own life skills may be lacking, who parent by trial and error, or simply by expediency and happenstance (for when you're struggling to figure it out yourself while making enough money to support a family, and building a career and "working on" your marriage/relationship, much subtlety can fall by the wayside).
Then we go to school, to be taught and socialized, and what they teach us is not how to be in the moment, how to be present to each other and to the world; rather, they teach us, mainly, to memorize, to speculate, to break things down into their constituent parts and leave our understanding of the movement and operation of the whole to someone or something else. We are taught to follow orders, often without knowing the "why" of things; we are taught to conform, all of us saying the pledge of allegiance together (do they still do that?), often dressing alike, being asked to "behave" alike; we are taught to see what's wrong with things: remember those puzzlers? "What's wrong with this picture?" and there'd be someone riding a bicycle that is upside down, and someone with three hands, and you'd go through and circle all the "wrong" things?
Then we're sent out into the world and told to thrive.
It's no one's fault. We can teach only what we know, and what most know is only what they were taught by others who didn't know.
So if we're lucky to stay alive long enough to discover how much we don't know; if we have enough experiences of failing to thrive in spite of doing everything we were taught; if we stumble across an indication that there's more to life than our thoughts and our desires, and that there's a way to contact that more; then we begin to look for that way.
Our meditation is one way. It is not the only way, but it is a way that truly works, consistently, and that consistently leads us in the direction of joy and an experience of abundance. And as we embrace it and the world view from which it comes, we become able to pass on to our own children some ideas and some tools--of wholeness and peace, joy and compassion, endless possibility--the sum of which will grow in them the ability to find for themselves a meaningful life. And that might almost make the first part of all this worth going through.
Today I will have compassion for myself, and others like me, for those learned behaviors that have ceased to work.
Babies, Somewhere in Montana
All material copyright Jeff Kober
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