Three hearts

Every Friday afternoon, my friends and I do Project Downtown.  We put together packages of food and snacks - lately it's been a hot dog or hamburger, a granola bar or two, a cheese bun and/or a muffin, an orange, a banana and juice - and distribute them to people hanging around City Hall who look like they would appreciate the food. 

We learned about Project Downtown four years ago, when a student from the US came to Toronto and introduced it to us.  One of the things he told us has really stuck with me.

Recently, I realized that it's something that applies to any good work or act of kindness done to benefit another person.

He said that when we go out and do Project Downtown, our actions touch three hearts.  One, we touch the heart of the recipient.  Two, we touch the heart of the person who sees us do what we do.  And three, we touch our own hearts.

How are you? Really?

How often do you say 'How are you?' out of habit?  How many times has someone asked you the question without waiting for the answer?  How do you answer when you're not actually fine or good or great or okay?

Can we ask the question differently?  Should we ask How are you feeling? How are you, really? How are you on a scale of one to ten?

It's an important question.  We need to ask it.  We need to answer it.  We need to hear the answer.  We need to have our answer heard.

Seventy excuses

One of the great early Muslims, Hamdun al-Qassar, said, “If a friend among your friends errs, make seventy excuses for them.  If your hearts are unable to do this, then know that the shortcoming is in your own selves.”

I use this one a lot.

I love working in the community where the efforts of a group of people combine to create something greater than the sum of its parts.  But, as in any enterprise involving people, mistakes will be made.  The ball will be dropped (sometimes by me, which is another reason why I use it a lot).  And often, things will not go exactly as planned. 

When this happens, rather than attribute the error to malice, carelessness and disrespect, we make excuses for our friend.  We don't even need to make seventy.  I find once I get to two or three, I start feeling better already. 

I've always thought of this tradition as a good way of maintaining social relations.  And it is.  It keeps us from planting seeds of ill will against each other.  But besides that, it also helps us maintain a good emotional state within ourselves.  For as much as the way we see the world might affect how we treat other people, it really affects ourselves the most.

In the eye of the beholder

True beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  That was the topic in our Toastmasters table topics competition today.  Thankfully, I didn't participate.  I can only imagine what nonsense I would have blabbered on about if I was tasked with talking about this for 1-2 minutes, impromptu.   As a member of the audience, though, I had the benefit of a whole day to think about it.

I thought of how much of what we see is as much a reflection of our selves as it is of what we're looking at.  Sheikh Mukhtar Maghraoui talks about this with respect to what we see with our hearts.  Just as the eyes are organs of perception, so is the heart.  The heart can sense and be moved by beauty in the world around it.

But not all hearts see equally well.  Hearts can become clouded by evil thoughts and actions.  Such hearts may no longer be able to see beauty or they may see the beautiful as ugly.  So we struggle to purify our hearts with good thoughts and good actions.  In the hopes that we can see clearly again.  In the hopes that we can see and be moved by beauty.

Upside down and backwards

I was reading Charles le Gai Eaton's book, King of the Castle today.  In it, he makes a very interesting point about religion and our modern world.  Our modern western society is unique in that it dismisses or puts in the periphery, what all other societies before it had made central in their lives -- namely a belief in the Divine and in an existence beyond our material world.

These beliefs came and still come in many forms.  But they were always there.  Somehow, all humans before us believed in a power beyond themselves.  They saw our world as part of something bigger.

Now, many people view such beliefs as backwards and incompatible with rational thought.  So what they're saying is that our ancestors in humanity -- all of them, for millenia -- have been completely wrong and it is only now, in the past century or so, that we got it right.

Now that is something have a hard time believing.

The joys of doing

There is so much at our fingertips.  We can read about anything, talk to anyone, buy anything we need from anywhere in the world without even getting out of bed.  It's all so convenient.

Just like anything else, convenience also has a cost.  I'm not referring to cost in terms of dollars and cents.  I mean cost in terms of what we've lost or what we give up in exchange for convenience.  These costs include loss of skills, self-reliance and the sheer joy of doing.

But they're not really lost.  They're just available through alternative options.

The great thing with conveniences it that they're optional.  We don't have to do things the easy way.  We can cook instead of eat out, sew something instead of buy it, do something ourselves instead of paying someone else to do it.  Along with the final product of a meal to eat or an item to use or something that's been fixed, doing things with our own two hands gives us experience, improved skills and satisfaction that money can't buy.

When dreams meet reality

I pulled up an old email a while back.  It was written four years ago.  I wrote it to one of the leaders in  my community, telling him about some of the things I hope to work on and achieve, so that he could assign me tasks accordingly.  Looking at what I wrote, I realize how much things have changed -- or how much I have changed.

It's not that I'm now opposed to the goals and plans I wrote about.  No.  I still believe that these are good things to do.  But what I see in that email was a tremendous amount of hope and optimism that I have since lost.  Reading that email, I'm almost astounded by the naivete of this girl who had and expressed these dreams just a few years back.  It's sad.  I couldn't imagine writing the same thing now -- or even anything close to it.

Maybe that's just how things go.  We have dreams, we try to implement them and when they encounter reality, they get changed, or lost, or broken, or crushed.  Then what are we supposed to do?  Do we find our dreams again, put them back together and try again?  Just the thought of doing that puts a knot in my chest.  Or do we stop dreaming -- put these dreams back on the shelf where they will be safe from the hazards of reality and where they will remain as mere dreams?  No.  I can't do that.  What is the point of the day to day struggle if there is nothing to strive for?   No, I won't shelve my dreams.

No, I'm going to find those dreams again.  I'm going to put them back together and nourish them back to health and try to bring them to reality again.  The alternative is just unacceptable.