We did it, and we're happy we did!

During a recent Skype video call with our daughter, Leigh, she was very animated about an experience she had volunteering on a project for the School of Social Work. Now, thinking back on this, we had given her a few opportunities to be down with the struggle, but it was always controlled. I believe Leigh and some of her confirmation classmates sorted food at one of the food pantries in Pontiac, Michigan. But that was sorting and organizing donations and didn't have any of the recipients present.

Well, Leigh's volunteer work was doing the registration desk administrative activities for a parenting class in Inkster, Michigan. She expressed shock at the circumstances that most of the attendees found themselves. Simple things like low literacy levels seemed so strange to Leigh that someone couldn't read or that they just weren't able to comprehend questions. And she observed that the chaos that these people exposed their offspring to was in such stark contrast to her home life as a child that seemed so regimented and mundane.

But how she and her brother grew up was a purposeful exercise. Of course, in his 2005 book "Freakonomics", economist Stephen Levitt postulates that it was not so much the actions we took but simply who we were that was the greater influence on our kids' outcome. He was arguing against the obsessive parent syndrome or OPS as the pop parenting trend. But the one thing that I am probably more sure of the efficacy in anything Deb and I did was that David and Leigh grew up in a world of absolutes; things were either right or wrong, no gray areas. The sun, the moon, the stars and the seasons all have recognizable patterns of behavior as our lives should. I do believe Deb was a bit excessive in some things, but I have to admit that David and Leigh still have very good phone manners but that's because Deb told them that it was a mortal sin to answer the phone impolitely.

But over the past few years I've realized how much we walled our children off from the realities of the world. David pinged me from the observation room of his first focus group asking if these were the type of people I talked to when I moderated groups. He was shocked at the level of naive ignorance the participants exhibited. Now this description that Leigh presented of her volunteer experience made me think about how the Siddhartha's father, the king, must have felt when Siddhartha had slipped out of the palace and got down with his peeps. Well, Siddhartha may have gone overboard a bit, but then again, that was 2600 years ago when being poor meant something; when Untouchables were REALLY untouchable. (I caught one of the younger beggars in front of St. Alphonsus on his cell phone -- busted! No biscuits for HIM anymore!!) Anyhow, I realized that my children had been going through the process of finding the gray areas of living and being exposed to some stark realities that they had never experienced. And the Buddha had a contemporary who was even farther out than he was: Mahavira, the founding saint of Jainism. Now many of the figures you see of what many people think are of the Buddha are really Mahavira. You could say "all religious converts look alike" and you'd be quite right, but you can tell Mahavira from Buddha fairly easily, Mahavira's the guy without a Dodi.
Yep, nekkid as a Jaybird, as they say in Karnataka. Well, they say it in Kannadian, once again not to be confused with Canadian. Afterall, you don't see too many people in Yellow Knife walking around nekkid in November, do you?
Mahavira preached that you don't kill anything. He was way beyond PETA. Some Jain aesthetes wear a cloth over their mouth as to not suck in a bug. Their yogis are the ones that practice bringing their hearts to a stop, leading to Moksha or release from all greed and fear. Same goal as the Buddha, but more dramatic; Buddha was into the enlightment as a mechanism to release. You can reach Nirvana without the radical element of, well, dying.

And that's one of the things we in the West often mistake about Nirvana. We think of "bliss" in terms of an orgasm, whether sexual or tasting some great chocolate. Just the opposite! It's experiencing -- nothing! Nope, no pain, no fear, no lust, no nothin'! And that's the hardest thing of all for us to do. I love living. I love eating and drinking. I love loving. I love watching the sun rise and set, the moon rise, the stars come out, the waves hit the shore, the lightening strike across the sky, and on and on and on. I don't care to give up any of those feelings I experience from living. OK, yes, I experience fear, worry, anxiety, anger over another lost season of Michigan football, yadda, yadda, yadda, but that is a price I am willing to pay for what is all the other wonderful stuff I experience. A great scene from an OK film adaptation of a William Faulkner short story "Long, Hot Summer" is delivered by Orson Welles at the end of the movie where he says "I just might live forever" expressing his joi d' vie.

I'm not looking for Moksha any time soon, so I'm going to go for now. Have a great day!