Everyone has the ability to teach

We don't know it all. There's always time to learn something new. Your elders, parents, teachers don't always know it all. You can always teach them. Children especially are excellent teachers. They remind us of a carefree innocence that we've forgotten. The joy of life. Pure kindness without asking for anything in return.

My son teaches me everyday, not by saying much, but by being very quiet. Quite frankly, I don't know where he got his character from. He seems like a world unto itself yet participating, on the side. He is the coolest kid I know. Very comfortable and sure. I was never that way at that age. Even though I was a bit more independent, moving out to college on my own, I still don't think I portrayed the self assurance and confidence that he has. This is something that can be transferred into a very usable life skill. I wonder sometimes if he realises this. The confident assurance that he has. And he is blessed too. Healthy and strong, things I perhaps took for granted at his age, which I don't now. I'm very much aware of the passage of time, the rigidity of the knees, the diminishing vision and the difficulty of getting up from a chair. It's a battle nobody wins, eventually gravity will have its way and the laws of physics will hold.

And it's from him, my son, that I understand that you don't have to wait for age to make you into a sage. You can declare yourself a sage, right now, and begin to live a driven by you. I've met older people, in their fifties, sixties, still waiting for the wisdom that comes with age. It's a Kenyan thing to respect your elders. The west has since lost it, but in Kenya, you still respect someone who's older than you are. This automatic respect comes from a place where you believe that this older person has something to teach. They have something of value which they can transfer to you simply based on the fact that they've been alive longer than you. They've seen things. Walked the planet and found out things and if you are patient, and respectful, then this information, this knowledge that can only come with time can be transferred to you. So that you don't make the same mistakes. So that history does not repeat itself. But it's not entirely true. Some people become sages before their tenth birthday and some never attain it even past their seventieth. It was George Carlin who once said that respect should not be automatic, it should be earned. This is when he was talking about automatically respecting your parents. Yes, in some extreme cases, some parents, who are abusive, do not deserve automatic respect. But that's extreme. On the whole, respect to elders, to parents, to children to the entire humanity should be automatic. Innocent until proven guilty. Respect first, and then when you find out that the person does not deserve it, withdraw it later.

I live in the world of public transit. I remember a time when the only time I interacted with strangers was in the supermarket. Or the movie theatre. Perhaps also in the restaurant. But my car was my mode of transportation.

Now I ride the Toronto Transit buses and trains. I interact with people, not directly, but by being in the same space. Sharing space. I'm amazed when I look at people and try to imagine what's going on. Do they have the same fears, ambitions and other issues like I do? What are they facing right now? When they look at me, what do they see? Like me do they want me to stay away, not approach them? I'm in transit and I don't want to be bothered. I don't want you to talk to me since I'm busy in my own space.

I realise that we're all trying to make it.

We're all struggling to find a solution. To make sense of the world around us. To make something of this existence. We're all guessing and in this guessing we come up with solutions which seem to explain the world around us. And we package this into a philosophy of life and we then sell it. Sometimes not consciously, but we subconsciously sell it to our family, our husbands and wives, our children, the people we interact with. If you want to be successful, this is how you should think and look at things. If you don't look at things this way, then you won't be able to make sense of life and you will be living a wasted life. We sell it as the way to be, if you want to be successful.

And that's the question that's interested me most. This issue of making it. Of being a success, because, honestly, there are some people who don't care about the type of success that seems important to others. Why would you become a monk? Why waste your life in prayer and meditation? For what? What do you get out of it? Is the actual practise a soothing and calming way to live? Because, it really can't be a means to an end. It can't, simply can't. Which happens to be my main problem with organised religion. Suffer here, on this planet, for rewards to come later. Yes, it's that simple. Perhaps one day I'll blog about it, but today isn't that day.

Some people are influential. They seem to be confident in what they're doing and drive change. They say it is so, and are rarely challenged that it may not be so. They don't have to be old and wise, they can be in their early teens. They have a focus on what they want and they think that what they want is probably the same thing that others want. In some cases, it matters not what others want as long as they get what they want. Forging onwards, relentlessly. On the flip side, there are those who watch too much. Care too much about public opinion, about the opinion of their parents, their spouses, their children, their bosses and so they move a lot slower. They add, into every decision, elements of what they think others might think. I remember a saying, it goes something like, it's not what others think about us that makes us inactive, its what we think others think of us.

How true.

I started this post by saying that everyone has the ability to teach. It's been a rambling back and forth, trying to explain a mixture, confusedly knotted, unordered mess of thoughts really pointing to the notion that there's a lesson everywhere you look. The world doesn't revolve around you, or me, and it certainly doesn't revolve around your boss, your peers, your spouse, parents or children. It just is. And you pick and choose and learn. It doesn't matter that that child has only been on the planet for ten years, and you've been around for forty. There's a ten year experience that might be worth a nugget for you, if you just open up and look.

Maybe one day I'll unravel what I've mangled in this post, but for now it seems OK.