A Sensitivity to Things

There’s a funny saying about things that go around coming around. Usually it’s karma, an eye for an eye and a sow for a reap—the great spiritual law of the universe that dictates bad things for things done badly, good for that done gladly.

But inspiration goes around as well, and more like a fire than the predictable arc of an arrow—leaping, dancing, taking light as it spreads; a force that creates and multiplies rather than destroys.

A blog comment by a reader inspired me to write an entire post in return, a list of childhood memories which beget and became My First Meme, a charming, illumining anecdote on age, meditation and self-transcendence at Sumangali.org:

Age does not matter. Until his passing at age 76, Sri Chinmoy proved that to me. Through his life of meditation and self-transcendence he showed me that perhaps I am not as limited as I think. I hope to continue forgetting how old I really am. I hope to feel amused, rather than bound, if I do happen to remember, and grateful to Sri Chinmoy, especially if others find it funny too.

The torch is passed, the wheel turned. And so it goes…

What Matter Age?

I can relate to the sentiments above in so many ways.

At age thirteen, and in my first year in High School, I would at times be mistaken for sixteen or older, not because of my size, but my attitude and demeanour. I was overly serious and “adult,” something of an grown up trapped in a child’s body, and for the most part related to my elders better than my peers. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing unless it is making you miserable. It was and then some.

Now twenty years on and thirty-three, I find age to be a bit of a joke. I have reached a kind of dim, twilight zone, like a purgatory between youth and senility, where I have to stop and think to remember my age. I still can not believe I am in my thirties, and for that matter during my twenties I could not believe I was not a teen.

This is only because of meditation.

With the regular practise of meditation—in which I am certainly no expert, but hopefully an advertisement for: a poster-child for meditation’s slow-dawning felicitation to experience life in the ever present, ever lasting now—I again feel as I did before those forgettable, teen-aged years.

Like a child. Like myself once more.

Musing upon the inevitable forward march of age, I am reminded of learning to drive recently—several years ago in fact—in which getting over the insistent feeling that I was an impostor acting as a grown-up—driving seeming like such a grown-up thing to be doing—was far harder than getting a handle on the rules, firm grip of the wheel.

Likewise my career. After years striding the streets as a postman—a card-carrying job for loners, introverts and others who wish to drop out of the ‘nine to five,’ or in my case, approximate a wandering, meditating monk, composing poetry while roaming up to thirteen kilometres a day, I exchanged hair shirt for one starched, press-ganged into a pre-press job with a design company, and rejoined my last seen at university, career-making peers on the cusp of their thirties, threshold or over of marriage, mortgages and children.

What a joke it all was. Feeling like a child trapped in a far too big body I had to get head around idea of being an “adult,” or at least its outer appearance; joining serious colleagues in serious decisions about heavy responsibilities and pressing problems—not to mention getting in line for performance appraisals and promotion, a necessary evil when regular, expensive overseas trips to supply my meditation habit—or self-enlightenment sanity excursions as I subtitle them—were a necessity.

Throughout my extended tour of the five-days-a-week world of adult duty, I was always keenly conscious of the illusory nature of it all, of its secondary status to the pursuit of my ageless, real identity.

Funnily enough, and this is a very real letter of recommendation for meditation, I find that people value a person who can bring a child’s touch to a serious situation, a person able to laugh and to joke, remain good-natured and even-tempered when others do not. I was genuinely moved by the extent my colleagues showed their appreciation when it was time to move on from that job—their sincere, heart-felt sentiment running to pages on hand-made leaving card. Not to mention all of the hugs I had to dodge.

In feeling like a child still, I in truth should be grateful to my mother, whose raising of me was anything but conventional—I am “old” enough, or at least wise enough to appreciate this now. Now sixty-five and looking barely fifty, she is a guileless, child-like woman, and as far away from adult politics and game-playing as is possible; it is I her child who has to point out the alternative interpretation of occasional, unintentional faux pas. Her youth-like, light of heart qualities I once mistakenly sought to uproot in myself, leave behind in a wrong-headed, head-strong rush to “grow up”—early, regrettable attempts at self-transformation with a labourer’s pitchfork, rather than the meditation’s gentle pruning.

But most of all, I can relate to Sri Chinmoy’s philosophy of self-transcendence—transcendence of mind, belief, achievement and of age. In this respect alone I have so much to be grateful to my meditation teacher for.

Initially self-taught in meditation—I am something of an autodidact in most things; a good quality when one remembers to be humble, or the much that one does not know—I have come to learn that meditation is so much more than a moment of peace, or a silent mind only in a silent room. Sri Chinmoy’s philosophy of the child-like heart, of living as a child rather than living childishly, has re-invented my life in the most remarkable ways, transformed me in a fashion I once could not imagine.

Compared to my former self, you could say I am re-born.

Photo Credits

1. Teh Google
2. Mail model John Gillespie, Post News, Dec 2003
3. Pavitrata Taylor

Six facts about me as a child, with due respect to Pavitrata.

1. No fast fried pleasures, please

I never spent my pocket money on junk food as a child. Which is not to say that I didn’t like junk food, or to suggest merely a lack of money, but rather that spending hard earned, all too easily lost riches on something lasting but a fleeting moment—the temporary sense pleasure of food—made no sense to me at all.

I remember my early bewilderment clearly, not really understanding my peers as they downed sodas and crisps wantonly, their pocket money flagrantly, and I am not an adult who remembers not his childhood—to a large extent, no small thanks to meditation, it lives and breathes in me still.

It is a great shame this innate childhood common sense became less than innate as the years passed by, a growing worldliness, wisdom of the “ways of men” passing me not.

2. Pop music not so popular

I couldn’t bear popular music as a child. I listened to and owned nothing but classical music until the age of nine, and according to my mother used to cry in my early years if anything less refined was played. I taught myself to play the piano, memorising more by ear than note pieces by the great composers, and used literally to shudder at the sound and sight of punk bands then at their height.

That all changed with the advent of synth-pop—I skipped screaming electric guitar anthems, safety pins in your nose, furious drum solos, and went directly from Mozart to Madonna; Cyndi Lauper, Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw in between.

I was pretty normal from that point on. As a teenager I dreamed of haircuts and concerts, rather than wigs and concertos, and gave up the piano for the guitar after an intense battle of wills with a piano teacher, who told me on the morning of my Grade 3 exam that, lest my results harm her reputation, she was disowning me.

I did fail, by all of four marks, but more due to the fact that I didn’t feel inspired to practise, than any glee sought in tarnishing a disagreeable piano teacher’s name. I had refused to learn music theory; she had refused to teach me as accustomed “by heart.” I may not have been vindicated by my grade, but they have schools today devoted to the instincts I was following.

3. Football was my life

Football was my life for a number of years. Growing up in rugby mad “God’s Own” I rose at ungodly hours to watch “that other game,” fleetingly available when broadcast from the other side of the world, then spent morning, lunch and evening playing same with friends; otherwise just kicking a ball alone.

I was told by a coach at age fourteen that I had the talent to go to the highest level, if I could but “get the right attitude as well,” but it was meditation rather than football that coached me in the power of self-belief; trained out of me, ten minutes practise a day, my nagging, dribbling sense of self-doubt.

4. Turning Japanese

I was fascinated with Japan from an earliest age. When offered the chance by my mother to buy a book on a special occasion, I chose a children’s guide to this implicitly intriguing land of kimonos, karate and kabuki. Soon afterward I demanded lessons in karate, and attempted several times to learn the language—with more enthusiasm than steel or resolve.

Upon adulthood my fascination has waxed rather than waned; a more than decade-long marriage to the practise of meditation just one example of my un-struck appetite for things Nihon.

“Japan is a country filled with infinite beauty. It has an image of a beautiful flower garden. This beauty is expressed through inner peace. Man has seen many things, but of these things peace is new. Japan is offering this new treasure to the world.

“Japan has some other very special capacities to offer. Japan produces such small, beautiful things. God is infinite and finite-larger than the largest and smaller than the smallest. He is both the ocean and the drop. He is inside me as a human being and, again, He is inside the vast sky and ocean. In Japan I see God the Creator in His small aspect, but at the same time, so beautiful and powerful. Here I see the finite expressing the Beauty and Divinity of God in such a powerful way, and I am deeply impressed. It is like the difference between seeing a child do something and a grown-up do it. When the child does it, I get much more joy. In Japan’s case, the child is Japan’s childlike flower-consciousness-a beautiful flower is reaching the highest in terms of beauty and purity. As soon as I think of Japan, my mind feels beauty, my heart feels purity and my life feels humility. I could write hundreds and hundreds of poems about Japan. In fact, I have already written them in the depths of my gratitude-heart.”

Sri Chinmoy, Excerpt from Japan: Soul-Beauty’s Heart-Garden

5. Altar-ed states

I was raised a Christian. Not that I actually enjoyed going to Church, or Sunday School—in fact I would beg my mother every Sunday to leave me at home to watch “Big League Soccer, yet I studied and memorised the stories of faith, courage and heroism in my Picture Bible unbidden, and would pray most evenings without prompting.My last visit to church was around age thirteen, a time when my local congregation, almost completely absent of fellow teenagers, was split pew and rafters over the siting the altar—two metres this way or that I kid you not.

I don’t claim to be high and mighty but I do have a good eye for low and petty, and my hunger for spirituality and inner truth would from this point seek a different nama-rupa—name and form.

6. Interest in a mythical, mid-Atlantic clime

I have always been fascinated by tales of the lost continent of Atlantis. A childhood cartoon, of futuristic cities and technology existing beneath the surface of ocean, caught for only several episodes before sadly it went off-air, evoked hazy, strangely familiar memories that could not be placed; dreams that felt more like memories and that found another flame in stories my mother would tell of her mother, how she spoke cryptically of the existence a long forgotten, long ago buried land—to me a tantalising suggestion that there might still exist a living, breathing link through memories passed to an ancient, mythical mid-Atlantic clime.

Make me a Meme

Write up your own list of childhood facts and I’ll mention you here:

• Pavitrata: Six Childhood Facts—Pavitrata, the “cheerful fellow” who got the ball rolling
• Sumangali: My First Meme—Mummy, mummies, cheese and the reading of minds make for a quite outstanding list of childhood facts
• Sharani.org: The 6 Childhood Facts Meme—Tutus, patent leather shoes and the forbidden fruit of chocolate feature in Sharani’s walk down childhood’s memory lane.

“No one subject is of more importance to people than a knowledge of the rules, usages and ceremonies of good society. To acquire a thorough knowledge of these matters and to put that knowledge into practice with perfect ease and self-complacency is what people call good breeding. To display an ignorance of them is to subject the offender to the opprobrium of being ill-bred.”
—John H. Young, Our Deportment, 1882.

I’m quite clearly an anachronism. I feel offended at the smallest breach of protocol or manner where others feel none, shaking my fist, invisibly of course, at people on the sidewalk who walk obliviously, more subtlety people in conversation who talk obliviously. It might be that I’m thin-skinned, kept in-doors or in cotton-wool too long as a child. Or it might be that others are thick-hearted, hardened to feelings and fineries too subtle to be perceived.

We’ve come a long way in recent years, and, too easily caught up in pounding tables, berating empty air over the ills of the now, one forgets that much of what was once commonplace now has no place. Racism, sexism, name your ’ism, all are absolutely excluded from polite conversation, more or less marginalised from marginal conversation as well. Our grandfathers may not have got along, but we their grandchildren work along side each other, and in doing so, more than likely get on.

On the surface, polite face of it we have levelled the playing field, opened the team sheet to all who want to play, but equal opportunities do not niceties equal, and in shaving manners of their beard and moustache, jettisoning ugly and prickly anachronisms at door like hat and cane, we’ve lost the art of consideration and of grace. To my thin-skinned way of thinking—perhaps over-thinking—we’re just not so nice about being nice.

Rosanne J. Thomas, founder of etiquette training company Protocol Advisors, and dubbed “Miss Manners on Wall Street,” pins the modern decline in manners firmly on the 1960s donkey, and while our long-haired, long-trousered parents are to blame, it’s not just because of their fondness for twenty minute guitar solos:

“Prior to that, families ate together at the dinner table. Manners were reinforced all the time—conversation, listening skills, dining skills, basic considerations, and even electronic manners in that you didn’t take telephone calls during the meal. But then people began not to eat together as much, and that’s when the basics were no longer taught.”

Manners may be dead in this modern age, but Japan at least is refusing to put a fork—or chop-stick—in their deceased carcass, forming a “manners police” to re-heat the fast cooling standards of public etiquette.

In a country where courtesy was once second nature—the learning of a multitude of mores literally a life-long apprenticeship; their breach a possible loss of life consequence—the elderly and pregnant are increasingly being left to stand on trains; a failure of manners perhaps commonplace elsewhere, but in Japan unimaginable until recently.

“It is impossible to mark the even and peaceable tenor of Japanese life, the politeness, industry, respect for superiors, and general air of cheerfulness and content, that pervades all classes, without admiration of the wise regulations which preserve such order amongst them as a people. Quarrels and blows are almost unknown in families; the husband is gentle, the wife exemplary and affectionate, and the children singularly obedient and reverent to their parents: yet ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ is a precept totally disregarded. The children are never beaten, nor do the parents allow themselves to lose their tempers in rebuking them, however great the provocation may be—one remarkable result of the complete self-abnegation inculcated by their social system.”
—J. M. W. Silver, Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs, 1867

When I was school-aged—a time depressingly distant and fast becoming more so—giving up your seat for your elders was mandatory on public transport, but, occasional cranky pensioner aside, it was a practise of another age, seldom actually enforced.

Japan however expects respect and awareness of any age, in this very age, and to this end the Yokohama “Smile-Manner-Squadron” has been charged with bringing back the standards of “old Japan”—politely encouraging the young to give up their seats to those more needy on the city’s overcrowded trains.

While squadron members, the majority past their sixtieth birthday, have no legal powers, Yokohama hopes their high visibility—bright green uniforms de rigueur—will encourage a rising politeness. If not, the big stick of public shaming will be wielded, humiliation in hypersensitive Japan the recourse if seats are not voluntarily raised.

Should politeness provoke a reaction less than polite, older team members will be accompanied by a younger bodyguard, the Smile-Manner-Squadron operating in pairs and paying about US$15 a day. And unlimited train rides.

Why don’t Japanese young people give their seats to the aged? Nobuhiko Obayashi, 70 year-old author of “Why don’t young people give their seats to the aged?” has already asked the question, and answered it too—just like in the West parents are to blame, responsible for a generation in his words “too afraid to talk to one another.”

Not afraid to talk to another, Obayashi opined “Young people do not feel the need of having manners in their hearts,” and expressed a wish that the Smile-Manner-Squadron “will give people who are too shy a chance to communicate.”

And presumably once more claim a seat.

“The world was my oyster, but I used the wrong fork.”
—Oscar Wilde

Japanese Tradition: Shazai—Apology