I had a touching and gratifying conversation with a past student that I won’t get into.  All I’ll say is that one of the truest things in teaching, or anything for that matter, is having a serene feeling of joy and fulfillment in your heart that you can’t really put into words.  That inner peacefulness is not arrived at by being detached, uninvolved, or merely doing nothing. On the contrary, it is attained by doing substantive and significant things with a calm selfless service.  It is the belief that you have a huge potential to alter the future, that knowing how doing little things can have huge consequences, that 24 point headlines are the result of the four point details, and that it’s the little things that really make a big difference.   That means doing everything everyday with purpose, love, compassion, patience, passion, empathy, and genuine tolerance. It means doing it with a playfulness, joy, and enthusiasm.   It’s not just a job; it’s a belief system; it’s living your whole life that way.

This student showed me that the most considerate actions are so often the gently shaking ones, that one of the primary things that makes the people begin to transform is the experience of being seen.  Its a very intimate feeling that someone is really seeing you and seeing where you really live. It’s from such sight from which comes empathy.  Without such sight, do you know how many manifestations of  nobility, sacredness, beauty, and loveliness we miss every day?

Understand that there’s a kind of randomness all around us over which we have little if any control.  If nothing else, in our classes we have no control over who is sitting before us.  But our responses to that randomness are not random.  It’s our context.   The course of all aspects of our life depends on how we react to those possibilities, opportunities, challenges, and potentials that the randomness offers to us.  I’ve said it many times.  If you are possessed with an alertness, awareness, attentiveness, and otherness–all those components of mindfulness–you will find that things happen.

I don’t think these feelings and actions, however, are decisions made at a particular moment in response to a particular person in a particular situation.  They are the kind of person who you are, who is raising the unconscious to a conscious level, who has those perspectives, possesses those feelings, make those decisions, and takes those actions.

Louis