Non-possession of Good

Gandhi’s ashram includes “non-possession” as one of its rules. This rule is typically understood as forsaking our attachment of material things in order to focus our effort on service to others.  Gandhi’s life lends to a more challenging interpretation: not only should we not own material objects, we should not own good.  Gandhi’s guiding principle of practical idealism, a philosophy balanced by realism and optimism, finds new meaning in this conception of non-possession of good.  Together, non-possession and practical idealism give a roadmap to meaningful good and a guide to our work with the Bajaj Foundation.

The Gandhi the world knows began by happenstance.  Gandhi himself admitted as much in his autobiography, reflecting that “[a]n opportunity offered itself when… I was [not] ready for it” (80).  In South Africa, a laborer named Balasundaram who had suffered under an abusive employer approached Gandhi seeking his help. Gandhi chose to help the man, but there is an important distinction: he did not initially seek the opportunity.  He could not claim entire ownership of the act of doing good.  Gandhi could only claim partial ownership: each moment of good is the meeting of opportunity and decision.

Gandhi could also only claim partial ownership of the new identity that came from his interaction with Balasundaram.  After helping the man, a charitable identity was thrust upon him as the “case reached the ears of every indentured laborer and [he] came to be regarded as their friend” (81). Gandhi did not seek out these opportunities to help laborers, he simply had the choice of whether he wanted to reinforce or dismiss this new identity.  Gandhi decided to bolster this identity, but like the initial act that led to the identity’s formation, claiming complete ownership of the good he had done is not possible.

The partial, incomplete ownership of good is humbling. When an individual is possessive of good, it becomes an activity of ego and susceptible to the pitfalls of idealism.  Idealism, normally an extremely personal activity, is the cognitive movement from what’s possible to what should be possible and that movement can obscure limits.  Blindness to limits can lead to the sacrifice of impact for idealistic gains, however small.  Non-possession, on the other hand, inherently defines limits.   In the case of Balasundaram and the laborers, Gandhi recognized that he only played a part in bringing about the good.  Embracing non-possession shifts the focus of the good to the community and it’s one of the reasons why the work the Bajaj Foundation does is so meaningful.  Their work is driven by the fact that they don’t own the good they’re doing: they’re only part of the difficult process of making something meaningful happen in their community.  The Bajaj Foundation seems to understand that idealism can occasionally make them lose sight of what they set out to do in the first place.

That is not to say that non-possession and idealism are incompatible, only that it should be an idealism of the community, not the ego.  When asked if he would hypothetically accept a world government coming out of a meeting of nations in San Francisco, Gandhi replied, “I may not get a world government that I want just now but if it is a government that would just touch my ideal [of non-violence], I would accept it as a compromise” (Collected Works, Volume 86).  Gandhi used community ideals of non-violence as a guide, but was willing to compromise in order to have reality touch his ideal.  If Gandhi had been possessive of good in this case, his ego would have blocked a compromise.  Instead, Gandhi’s mindset of practical idealism gave a chance for the ideal to even exist.

The case of Balasundaram provides a useful focal point for understanding how Gandhi executed this mindset. Gandhi found that “[t]here were only two ways of releasing Balasundaram: either by getting the Protector of Indentured Labourers to cancel his indenture or transfer him to someone else, or by getting Balasundaram’s employer to release him.” (Gandhi 81).  Ideally, Gandhi would just abolish the archaic practice of indentured servitude; practically, he needed to simply release him from his contract. Gandhi regarded himself as a “practical reformer” who “[confined his] attention to things that are, humanly speaking, possible” (Collected Works, Volume 33).  In this case, by engaging in the art of the possible, Gandhi was still able to touch his ideal – the freedom of laborers – by winning an individual’s freedom.  Practical idealism, a philosophy grounded in non-possession, produced meaningful good in this situation.

These important lessons in non-possession and practical idealism can also produce meaningful good in our work with the Bajaj Foundation.  Most importantly, we must remember to stay humble, as we do not have complete ownership of the good we are trying to do.  In fact, our work is a network of collaboration between multiple university campuses, the Bajaj Foundation and communities with real needs.  The truth of this communal effort gives power to the bottom-up approach of the Bajaj Foundation, a principle grounded in non-possession, and we would do well to remember it as we make plans.

Just like Gandhi, our group has the chance to reinforce our identity as helpers with each decision we make.  Each of those decisions should be guided by practical idealism where we recognize our own limits and abilities.  We must ask important questions like, “What needs are we meeting?” and “Are we leveraging our identity to its fullest?”  When we leave Wardha in a month, we should also leave the good.  It is not ours to keep.

Sun and Sky

All of it. The young man who knows his dreams are constrained 

by unfair limits. An acceptance laced with dark humor.

Others just as deserving touch the sun. 

The enthusiasm of another youth who still has energy -

to believe he can be bigger than his body.

The world is better than this.

The creative, resurgent spirit of the downtrodden -

who bravely etch out space to grow.

The community fabric woven by countless willing hands.

My own inadequate attempt, 

just drops in a bucket.

The dogged, hopeful belief - 

those drops matter.

The still hungry mouths and minds

never to be reached. And I say, nevertheless.

[Prompt: write a poem using the first and last lines of A Stubborn Ode.]

The Stuff of Dreams

I am a traveler.  I state this because of the vast difference between traveling and migration.  Traveling is an opportunity afforded to few to wander and explore; migration is a movement of necessity and often urgent purpose.  Almost a cliché, I am one of the privileged travelers, a young, educated, white male on a semester-long journey.  Despite this, the fact that I am not a migrant does not detract from the truth that to travel is to learn.  Traveling is learning about the unseen past and present as well as the unrealized future.   In its purest form, to travel is to engage in reflection and projection.

Traveling wipes out the ingrained sensory adaptation to our environment, the process of tuning out repeated and normal events in order to keep the brain from overheating.  While that filtering is often useful, much is lost in the process.  Travel directs our eyes to see the same things from a different perspective.  Paulo Friere, in We Make the Road by Walking, calls this destruction of the filter “ruptura”, noting that “there is no creativity without [it], without a break from the old” (38).  Ruptura, facilitated by travel, can be a mirror for the unnoticed past and present.

My first time traveling was to Malawi in the summer of 2009 and it was there that I experienced ruptura.  I worked at a rural hospital in Namitete, a small village an hour from the capital city of Lilongwe, on a variety of projects ranging from teaching the cleaning staff in the post-op ward basic physical therapy to helping design a low-cost incubator out of basic materials.  Every day, I interacted with people who had a small but vital role in their community.  It took a journey across an ocean to realize simple truth: everything counts.  The previous fall I had enthusiastically volunteered in the 2008 presidential election for then Senator Obama, but I questioned whether what I did really mattered.  Upon reflection in Malawi, I concluded that those small actions add up to something much larger.  I had discovered the power of collective action.

Ruptura isn’t just about rethinking the past; the break also provides a contrast that illuminates the present.  In the fall of 2012, I threw my energy yet again at the American political process, taking on a student leadership role in Obama’s reelection campaign .  Months after another landmark experience, I arrived in Doha to hear no one talking about political activism.  I have yet to meet a student in Education City who is as excited as I am about the possibility of public service in government.  In Malawi, traveling taught me the importance of small, collective community action.  In Doha, traveling revealed something I have undervalued my whole life: the invigorating opportunity to be part of government and politics.

Political activism is a form of expression.  Again in Doha, travel unearthed something I’ve missed in my acceptance of what’s normal: the power of expression and freedom of speech.  I came to this revelation while listening to hip-hop during a long lunch on a day off from classes, when I realized that one element I hadn’t seen in Doha was anger and discontent freely expressed.  I’m not an angry person, but listening to music fueled by discontent - artists like Macklemore, Lupe Fiasco, and Talib Kweli - made me pause and regard anger’s power.  Friere goes further, tying knowledge to emotion, stating that “knowing for me is not a neutral act, not only from the political point of view, but from the point of my body… it is full of feelings, of emotions, of tastes.” (23).  It’s only when we have the full range of emotion available to us as a tool of expression that we can truly say something profound, that we can we really know something.

The forced mirror that traveling creates is not not necessarily always a good thing.  We travel with our own prejudices and judgement is prejudice’s close companion. Myles Horton, thinking through his attempts at community education, reflected that “I couldn’t see how this was part of anything that I knew anything about and couldn’t quite bring myself to think there were ways of doing things outside the system” (50).  Perhaps the lack of political activism and freedom of expression is not an issue in Qatar and the people are happy with current state of affairs and I’m stuck in the American mindset.  Thinking through these contrasts - democracy versus absolute monarchy, free versus limited speech - is a valuable exercise thrust upon the traveler.  Through these exercises, travelers can begin to have an idea of the future they want to project for themselves and others.

Sorting out the prescription for self is the easier endeavor and relies heavily on curiosity.  Friere, elevating curiosity as “absolutely indispensable for us to continue to be or become”, gives it an important place in self-growth.  Without curiosity, the contrasts encountered through travel would never be explored.  I cannot imagine a world for where I cannot fully express myself.  The differences between Qatar and the United States has solidified my appreciation of the freedom of speech and my commitment to that right being part of my own life.  Disparity offers a simple choice for the individual: which do I prefer?

Extending prescription beyond self becomes much more difficult.  As I travel and collect experiences to compare and contrast, I have to not just consider what I would prefer, but what would be best for others.  This thought process is not about a contrast between existing communities but for the one we want to see.  Freire calls this projection of the future a “dream with a different society” (58).  Like John Rawl’s famous thought experiment, the original position, this community of dreams must be built keeping everyone’s interests in mind.  In the case of freedom of speech, I cannot dream of a society without it.  My short time in Doha has already shown an opportunity for discontent to find voice in the plight of the country’s migrant workers.

Traveling gives us a chance to think with a blank slate as movement shifts perspective and shakes the mind free from its complacency.  With that temporary tabula rasa, the traveler begins to see things he may have overlooked.  More important than that reflection, though, is the opportunity that traveling presents to dreamers.  I travel to collect the stuff of my dreams, for myself and for others.  I bump into contrast, brainstorm blueprints for the future I want to see and continue the construction of a better world in my mind.  When I return from my travels, I can only hope that the dreaming continues while the hands get to work.

An Unequal Exchange

Education City has an undercity of workers that keep its cogs clean, its chains moving and its grandeur intact and growing.  Construction workers raise new buildings almost overnight in their long half-day shifts.  Security guards silently watch in every building, a seemingly unneeded measure given EC’s perimeter checkpoints.  Cleaning crews wipe down the behemoths that Doha calls buildings, keeping the campus in a pristine state.  While these construction workers, security guards and cleaning crews all have a different function in EC, they all have something in common: they are immigrants.

Of Qatar’s roughly 1.8 million inhabitants, only about a quarter million are citizens, a result of demanding requirements.  The rest, with a few exceptions for expats, are immigrants from the surrounding regions: the Arab states, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal.  Our group has been learning about these migrant workers and the challenges they face.  They are often recruited with false promises - secure, well-paying jobs - only to be met by the harsh reality of Doha.  While not all migrants suffer the same fate, many experience dismal living conditions, delayed or missing pay, restricted movement and absent job mobility.  The other day, our group took an “alternative tour” of Doha, visiting the segregated migrant sector of the city and walking through a factory.  I preferred seeing the city from this perspective because it gave the tremendous growth and wealth of Doha a gritty and truthful context.  Ever since our discussions of migrants workers has begun, it’s been difficult to grapple with learning their struggles on a campus built by their hands but not to their benefit.  While it’s not my place as someone in a state of admitted ignorance of a total picture, my short time in Doha tells me that something must be done.

Despite this, I have to be careful not to disparage these workers’ humanity.  It is so easy to do this, to paint people as victims and not see their resilience and their power. Americans are seeped in our own imaginings of American exceptionalism, but where does our greatness come from?  While credit must be given to our innovative thinkers and leaders, I think sometimes we forget the common hands that gave those innovators a foundation to even jump into the unknown and the difficult in the first place.  Slaves, farmers, factory workers… immigrants.  Americans are so aggressive in our judgement of illegal immigrants, but we owe our greatness to them as well.  In the face of inequality and difficulty, the untold stories are powerful and many.  

Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with workers in Doha and add some depth to my understanding beyond their struggle.  Our group has been tutoring some of the cleaners who work on Georgetown’s campus here.  They’re all at very different stages, but we’re trying to teach a little bit of English and computer skills as well as have some conversations about their own lives.

Each tutoring sessions has been a unique experience, but my favorite so far was this past Tuesday.  As a tool to teach the differences between past, present and future tenses, we asked the workers to construct timelines of their lives.  We explored their past - where and when they were born, marriages, children, travel to Doha - but also what they wanted for the future.  I was working with two men, one 38 and the other 25.  Both came from Rapti, a region of Nepal, were married with one son and want to open a business sometime in the future.  The older man wants to open up a restaurant (but not cook - he wants to be the boss!) and the younger one aspires to sell bananas.  Resisting the urge to make an Arrested Development reference, I asked why bananas and we eventually came to the conclusion that it would be a more diverse selection because he loves all kinds of fruit.  At the beginning, the younger man was incredibly quiet but by the end was laughing and more confident in the telling his story.  I joked with both of them that I would come visit Rapti and drop by the restaurant, hoping that the older one was buying fruit from the younger.

For my community advisor interview (got the job!), I did a little research on different conceptions and understandings of community.  One of my favorite was the idea of a community of memory, where a group of people have not only have a shared history, but a shared sense of what they want in the future.  The tutoring session felt like the creation of a community of memory: both men came from a similar background but had plans for improvement in their future.  Although still an outsider, for a moment I felt part of this community of memory as we all had a shared hope for a better tomorrow.

In the end, though, it still felt like an unequal exchange.  Sure, I’m departing a little knowledge of English or how to use a computer but they are giving so much more.  They are raising and then maintaining the buildings in which we learn and making what we do possible.  Perhaps even more powerful, they are giving hope and knowing hope is a tremendous force.  It is only when we know hope that we can attempt to translate it into something more tangible, and I am immensely grateful for all who give me the gift of hope.  My humble goal is to take that hope and try and make the exchange - individually, locally, globally - a little more equal.

The Power of Curiosity

Curiosity is the most important trait for making the most of any experience. Curiosity sparks the initial interest and the subsequent action and the adventure that may follow is where life resides.

I’ve been doing my best to stay curious in my first week in Doha and I’ve found the best way to practice that curiosity is to actively ask questions of the people I meet and explore their stories as much as possible. During an RA staff meeting last year I jokingly said that people are my currency (I will occasionally make silly philosophical statements during staff meetings), but that joke has a lot of truth to it. You can either have a life that trades in things or experiences and connections between people are like the dark matter of those experiences: they are the scaffolding for everything that we see before us.

Because Qatar is a country that attracts people from all over the region (Nepal, India, Pakistan, Syria, Bangladesh, etc.), you find a plethora of good stories. The people are very friendly (and sometimes confused at my interest) and the taxi drivers, security guards and students that I have met have been confronted with a restless curiosity.

One quick example. I met the friends of my roommate the other day and one was from India and the other was from Pakistan. I asked the student from Pakistan a lot of questions about how he thought the Pakistani people viewed America and my country’s involvement in the Middle East. I asked both of them how they thought the conflict between their two countries might find some daylight in the future. I really enjoyed hearing their perspectives on these important issues as we went out to hang out, drink tea, play poker and get food.

The other day, I watched a man give a presentation called “The Internet is My Religion” where he said something incredibly powerful: “Humanity connected is God”. Whatever God may be, I think we all know the power of connected people. I hope my curiosity continues to spark an exploration into that power.

The Pursuit of Experiences

The whole student crew (Lexi, Wesley, Marielle, Marcy, Molly, Tahirah, Marie, Asha and yours truly) are now in Doha, Qatar.

The trip was relatively easy (D.C. > Toronto > Frankfurt > Doha).  I flew into Toronto and was greeted by a few in the group as well as a delay for my flight to Frankfurt, which would ultimately lead to Doha.  The delay left me a 30 minute window to get through security and board the plane after landing, but thanks to packing light I was able to get a quick sprint workout through the airport and made it with time to spare.

Everyone but Tahirah was on the flight from Frankfurt so Wesley and I waited with Nico (Professor Slate has asked us to call him by his first name as his wife will be here soon and that makes Professor Slate a little confusing), Wesley and a student from CMU’s Qatar campus named Abai for her to land.  After Tahirah came in, Abai dropped Nico off at his hotel and we got to see a bit of Doha while he answered my incessant questions.  Doha is a really beautiful city with a host of different architectural styles for the number of new buildings that have shown up in the city in the last few decades.  We admitted to some hunger on the way back to where we are staying so we got our first taste of Doha with some shawarma (delicious grilled meat) and karak (chai tea popular in Qatar).  It was my first time trying both so it was a real treat.

I’m staying in the dorms here at Education City, a campus with multiple universities from around the world.  I haven’t met the other suite mates in my apartment, but my roommate is studying communication at Northwestern.  The campus is outstanding with tons of new buildings, facilities and well kept grounds.  Today we took a tour of the whole campus and Doha.  After some stops at the stables where the Arabian and European horses used for jumping, dressage and racing are kept and a mall modeled after Venice, we ended up in Katara, a cultural village with lots of museums, exhibits, and restaurants. We finished our day at a restaurant with a family style dinner with plans forming for trips out to the desert, watching a beach soccer tournament and attending a service at a center designed for non-Muslims.

I made myself a promise for this semester (and beyond) to take advantage of every opportunity and walk through the world collecting experiences.  The last few days have been jam-packed and I can already tell that the group with me is geared towards adventure and passion and each one has their own story to tell.  I can’t wait to hear them and have them join me in my pursuit of experiences.

Pack Light, Go Fast

I’m a bit of a minimalist and it definitely came through with my packing.  I place more value on experiences than things and my philosophy of minimalism embraces that sentiment.  The basic idea is that if you’re moving lightly through life, unencumbered by the weight of things (both physical and mental), you have space to focus making on making memories and taking everything you can from the moment.

I’ve followed a variety of writers and bloggers that focus on minimalism and simplicity, but for packing, sites like OneBag and Pack Light, Go Fast are king.  Those two sites definitely guided me through packing light. (Woohoo! I made it on Pack Light, Go Fast. Check it out.)

The result? Everything I need for the next four months - and beyond - are in this bag (Patagonia MLC - great bag), which comes out to about 23 lbs (sorry for quality of photos): 

The contents: 

Packing list

clothes (one week’s worth):

- 3 cotton / 2 short + 1 long synthetic cotton T-shirt

- 1 cotton / 1 synthetic button up

- 4 socks / 4 boxer brief

- 2 athletic shorts / 2 khaki shorts

- hat, sunglasses, bandana

shoes:

- sandals

- running shoes

electronics:

- MacBook

- iPhone

- Kindle

misc:

- travel towel

- toiletries

- medicine

- journal + pen/pencil

- water bottle

- light backpack for weekend / day trips

- books: Always We Begin Again, Tao Te Ching

- passport + wallet

- important docs

Comes out to about 23 lbs.

Traveling with long pants, pull over and jacket.

Packing light, moving fast.

An Unexpected Journey

This semester I will be studying, traveling and doing service projects abroad in Qatar and India along with a handful of other students from Carnegie Mellon and two professors (husband and wife).  We will study at CMU’s Qatar campus in Doha for a month and then head to Wardha (central India) to stay at Gandhi’s ashram.  After roughly the same amount of time, the group will then head south to Chennai.  Another month or so will then take us to the end of April and a final trip north to Delhi and Agra.  At that point, my official semester will be over but I’m hoping that my adventure will not be quite done.  I haven’t bought my return flight and I’m planning on doing some extra traveling while I still have the freedom of youth.

For the next couple months I will be writing about my experiences here at The Orange Sky.  When I went to Malawi in the summer of 2009, I kept a blog with the same name, its namesake one of my favorite songs by Alexi Murdoch. (I wrote a short piece about another one of his songs - he is a fantastic artist.) An excerpt from my first post that explains the name:

The song always struck a chord with me.  The singer expresses his dream of an orange sky, with his brother and sister standing by.  Family has always been important and influential to me. In the case of my adventure to Malawi, they are the reason why I am going.  Years ago my sister went to Malawi with my mother, and the following years my brother took a trip.  From their own experiences in Africa, my brother and sister have set their minds to impacting the world for the better using their outstanding education (brother recently graduated from Stanford and sister will be a junior at Rice University next fall).  They are an inspiration to me and no matter where they are on the globe, listening to the song connects me to them.

Not only that, but Murdoch sings that “my salvation lies in your love.  I’m a strong believer that the well being of every person lies in the compassion and empathy of others.  I think our capacity to connect with others while we live our short time in this world is fundamental to our existence. While Alexi Murdoch enchants his listeners to imagine an orange sky, I hope my own experiences in Malawi open my eyes to the discovery of my very own orange sky.

I want to have some continuity with my experiences abroad and the philosophy that guided me through my first trip.  Those posts were probably some of the best writing I’ve ever done because I focused on telling good stories about what I was doing and the people I met.  My promise to you as a reader is that I will only tell good stories.  Hopefully my creative juices will be flowing as well and I will keep writing more for my personal blog.

I decided to not bring a real camera (besides my trusty iPhone) and with it comes a challenge to myself.  I don’t want to be searching for moments to take pictures, I want to seek out the moments intrinsically.  As a writer, I have laid down the gauntlet to be able to describe my experiences well enough that I won’t need pictures looking back.  Of course, I will definitely use my phone’s camera but I wanted to focus more on the experiences and the resulting writing.

I can’t help but think of The Hobbit as I set out on my own unexpected journey.  I had always planned on studying abroad somewhere Spanish-speaking to utilize my (now awful) proficiency in the language.  However, last year the professor organizing the trip emailed me about the opportunity, saying he thought I might be a good fit.  Like Bilbo, I’m setting out on a journey that I didn’t quite plan for, traveling with wizard of sorts - the Professor Slates - and a motley crew, hoping to do some sort of good and packing light bags to leave room for adventure.

Here’s to discovering the next orange sky.    

The Three Beasts of Time

There are three beasts of time: the past, the present, and the future. Like wild animals, the future and the past react differently depending on how they are approached: they can either be companions or predators. Perhaps the most elusive of the three is the present, the one beast of time who tends to be shy, difficult to find and woefully afraid of the other beasts when they are on the hunt. However, no matter where you are in the world, one of these three beasts will be the reigning king of the moment.

On a typical day, everyone is dominated by the beast of the future. Take, for example, the wait at a subway station. Every time someone looks down the tunnel expectantly for a train, they are pulled further and further away from the tenuous hold that the beast of the present can manage and into the gnashing teeth of the future. Each look makes them more preoccupied with the future, with thoughts like “Now I’m going to be home half an hour later”, “I’ll miss my favorite show” or “It’s going to be tough to fit in exercise”. The tunnel continues to disappoint these future planners and they enter a state of constant reevaluation of their day’s itinerary. That state brings anxiety, frustration and worry: you can see it in their faces. The beast of the future tears has commanded the attention of all the waiting passengers.

In a moment like this, it’s worth it to make an effort to escape the hunt of the future. Maybe you leave the station and walk home instead. Maybe along the way, the timid beast of the present finds you and you stroll through the city streets together in harmony.

The beast of the past can be equally destructive. Just like the future, the past can become a hunter, poisoning its prey with regret. Regret is by far the worst of all emotions and a powerful tool of the past: there is no action that can work against the toxins of doubt that plague the victim’s mind. Other emotions like anger or jealousy have actionable remedies, but very few can escape the strangling nature of regret. Even the beast of the future can do little to fight against the past once its prey is caught in its jaws.

The beasts of the future and past are not always negative forces, though. The beast of the future, tamed properly, can be a helpful planner and shift from hunting you to helping you hunt down your visions of the future. Teach the beast of the future your strategy and it can navigate the timeline ahead and pull your plans towards the present where you can firmly grasp them. The past, removed of its dripping horns of regret, can bound into past memories and return with powerful ones that bring you joy and motivation When mastered, the beasts of the future and past become the companions of their shy brother and work in harmony with the quiet beast of the present.

The beast of the present is a fickle yet powerful creature. When the past and future are searching for prey, the present hides in the corner and only returns when it seems safe. However, when the future and past are tamed the present will flex its muscles. The companionship of the beast of the present brings comfort, new powers of observation and a freedom from worry. More than that, though, the beast of the present will do everything possible to amplify the positive memories of the past and make your visions of the future the reality of the present.

The three beasts work in tandem. The past fetches memories of the past and brings them to the present who can translate the past timeline into positive energy. The future attempts to drag ambitious plans closer to the eager jaws of the present, who, fueled with the positive foundation of the past, will temporarily reach outside of its comfort zone into the unknown and pull those plans into the present.

One way of looking at life is to see it as a struggle between the beasts of time. It is useful to wonder what the beasts are up to in a particular moment. When they all pull in different directions, the result is paralysis. When they work together, though, the beasts of time become an incredibly powerful team. The key to it all is finding the beast of the present, a creature of quiet but formidable power. Mindfulness is the humble search for the beast of the present and enlightenment could very well be mastering the beasts of time and maintaining the three brothers’ harmony. Because in truth, the divides between the beasts are only found at the edge of reality. Or, perhaps, there is only one beast: time.

Memories Not For Sale

I’m a time traveler of sorts. You see, the other morning something strange happened. Alone on the farm, I woke up to nothing.  A blanket of silence had enveloped my whole house, serving as gatekeeper to the outside world.  The early birds knocked against the silence with their singing, only to have their calls return to them dejected.  An unseen conductor waved his baton and a symphony of silence played all around me.

In a daze, I wandered through the house.  Time had stopped, perhaps tired from its relentless march through the eons.  As I stepped lightly across new carpet and worn wood, afraid I was going to break the tenuous magic of the moment, I began to see memories all around me.  Infinite moments came crashing through my consciousness.

In my room I see many younger versions of myself dive into books on my bed.  I am restless physically, fidgeting and rotating, but mentally lost in some far-off world.  Racing through night and day, I hear words traded between top and bottom bunk occupants.  An older brother, Josh, shares with me random musings.  A sister’s eventual husband and I grow closer.

Back in the present, I peek into my brother’s room and am thrown around the past.  I see Christmas mornings where a college-aged Josh is the last to wake up, blatantly refusing to adjust to a different time-zone than Stanford.  I witness his shelves rearranging priorities: first brandishing soccer trophies but then moving to souvenirs from journeys around the world.

I mosey into my sister’s room and suddenly bridesmaids are all around me, helping my sister prepare for her wedding day.  I look out her window and see her husband with groomsmen in tow walking towards the grand tree where they were to be married.  I catch the faces of my brother and I among the groomsmen: proud and in a place of profound peace and joy.  The wedding party fades and I hear my sister’s obnoxious oboe doing scales and an unkind voice - my own - telling her to be quiet.  She laughs but then repeats, dedicated.

Emboldened by these forays into the past, I continue to explore the memories scattered throughout the house.  Walking down the stairs I see many iterations of my brother, sister, and I scooting downwards in a Christmas ritual, cascading like the end of a computer solitaire game.

I descend yet again into the basement and peer around in the emptiness.  The ping-pong table, still occupying its normal spot, becomes animated with players.  My brother and I trade hits and conversation, losing track of time for hours.  Over by the TV, movies, TV shows and video games flash by in the darkness.  The people watching and playing rotate in and out, but when my mom appears she is always on the love seat.  I find this fitting.  The groomsmen appear again, sharing a quiet moment together before they head up the stairs for the wedding ceremony.

I follow the groomsmen upstairs and in the living room I smile as I see my grandfather napping on the ground with one of my dogs.  My grandmother is on the couch with a book and a crossword puzzle.  They vanish to be replaced by huge soccer ball beanbags and game consoles spread across the floor, with eager brothers and friends occupying them and engrossed in the action on the TV.

I walk into my dad’s office to hear important phone calls and the sound of creativity being transferred as he pumps out a few books on the computer.  I see his kids play pranks on him as they scare him with his headphones on.  A few feet away in my mom’s office I hear my her reassuring voice on the phone with her kids, asking them how their day went.

Dipping into the kitchen, I see her cooking thousands of meals for various combinations of kids.  The kids grab a stool and a spot at the counter and dig into the simple goodness, growing bigger and stronger as they flash in front of me.

I turn my head to the big table and am rushed through Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with family.  In the blur, I hear laughter and passionate debate.  I feel the warmth all around me.

The door, a portal to these memories, opens and closes.  Thousands of entries and exits flow by me like a river: family, friends and dogs stream in and out.  I see the tired faces of kids after soccer games return gratefully home.  I see my brother with bags packed and ready to go to college, with loving goodbyes exchanged.  I see an excited pair - a mother and daughter - head out the door to go to Malawi for the first time.

I follow these memories out the door and am greeted by dogs being called to dinner, racing around the corner of the porch eagerly.  I see cars pull in and out, kids learning to drive, Mom and Dad watching from the window.

Out on the lawn I see the lawnmower plodding back and forth, a fight to keep back the wilderness.  I see a wedding tent erected and a grand celebration.  I’m thrown back to a moment days ago where I see the “For Sale” sign at the beginning of our driveway for the first time.  This home was a unique place, an open secret.  Its physical frame is for sale, but the memories that have filled it are not: I have traveled all through the past and collected them.  I will carry them with me into the future, the evolving now.  The conductor takes a bow, the silence and magic of the moment is broken, and time wearily resumes its procession.