The Kindness of Others

Contemplate the kindness of others in your life, the Buddhist monk said to the fifteen of us.

One evening a week he drives over from a centre in Birmingham to conduct a teaching and meditation session in the local Quaker meeting house. The previous week, my first, he talked about making a decision to change the mind. Tonight, dauntingly, it was the need to cherish all living beings.

It doesn’t matter if the intention of the grumpy shop assistant was not one of kindness, you have benefited from the fact that she put the tin of baked beans on the shelf and accepted your money in exchange. From birth to death your life is upheld by the good deeds of others. You are a tiny cell in the body of creation, distinct yet united with the rest of life, so what you do can create benefit for others as you yourself have been supported.

Indeed, you can thank those people who require you to develop patience and tolerance and forgiveness. They are helping you to develop spiritually.

And you will sooner or later become enlightened.

I think about wounds inflicted and received, about Iraq and Darfur, about cruelty to children and animals and feel a pang of fear in my chest as the mind contracts and rebels. Can the practice of such concepts really, really, hold and redeem all the wickedness and misunderstanding abroad in the world? But something peaceful in the heart, in our teacher's gentleness and humour and in the quality of the meditative silence won't let me go. I pull back into the quiet. I am willing for now to take it on trust.

The homework was to reflect on the kindness of others in our daily lives. A couple of helpers came in with trays of peppermint tea and chocolate cake, and we tentatively started to talk among ourselves.

I will go back.

Home. Changes. Friends.

If I lose my direction, I have to look for the North Star, and I go to the north. That does not mean that I arrive at the North Star. I just want to go in that direction.
Thich Nhat Hanh

It’s been over a week already. I walk from room to room in this end-of-terrace house on the edge of town, trying to make my mark by placing familiar possessions in unfamiliar surroundings. The new refrigerator has arrived and the washing machine is due next week.

The ground floor already feels a little like home: books in the bookcase, the kitchen with saucepans and plates arranged in the cupboards, the sofa along one wall in the lounge where it catches the late afternoon sun. The remaining unopened cases and boxes are confined to the first floor where they sit reproachfully in the shadows awaiting attention.

The process of moving has been by turns disorienting, exciting, terrifying. At first glance, yes, life has changed. But I’ve moved before, traveled widely, shifted from home to home, country to country. Searching. Restless. All that's happened this past twelve months is that I’ve been able to adjust outer circumstances to form an apparently less constricting framework.

Real change is more subtle and requires greater skill. Acceptance of what has been irretrievably lost - it was never mine to hold - of what is and what can yet be gained. Trust. Daring to be happy, in spite of, because of, any reasons not to be.

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J came by yesterday for supper, armed with cuttings of chives from her garden for mine. An evening of catching-up. When she left she took with her most of my emptied cardboard boxes for use as mulch on her smallholding. Nothing wasted.

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The railway line that inaccurately traces the border between England and Wales lies less than a quarter of a mile away. Every twenty minutes or so the silence is broken by the muffled whoosh and rumble of a speeding train heading south to Cardiff and beyond, north to Manchester or Holyhead.

Their rhythmic, transitory presence is unexpectedly reassuring.

Snapshots of trains. Aged six with my mother, waving to the engine driver at the local level crossing. The first overseas trip aged thirteen, periodically lifting the curtain in the wagon-lit, enraptured, as we flashed through a succession of dark, shuttered German towns. Years later, in love, absorbing into myself the wail of the giant freight trains creeping and clanging through Flagstaff on a cold November night. The daily Parisian commute throughout the 1980s, glancing up at the destination board as I padded through through the Gare du Nord. Some days I was sorely tempted to take a different train, one destined for Moscow via Berlin and Warsaw. Or Amsterdam. Or Istanbul.

I seem to stay close to home these days, wherever it may be. Having long-distance trains pass nearby is a gift, rather like being unexpectedly reunited with old friends.

Photograph: a fragment of the Berlin Wall, now outside the Imperial War Museum.