History

The letter arrived at my office, the address several degrees off horizontal, written in careful, straight, but shaky, small block letters. It explained that the writer's husband had passed away recently, but had enjoyed receiving the publications we'd been sending him for years as an emeritus member of our organization. I wasn't sure anyone read the publications until this note arrived, which told me in the briefest terms, that her husband loved what he did, even after giving up his practice, continuing to keep up with the literature of his life. "He was 90" she wrote, and the letter I read told a much longer story.

I recently watched the film Александра (Aleksandra), again, about age, wisdom - and the Russian conflict with Chechnya. Aleksandra visits her grandson at his barracks. He is a soldier on the Chechnyan border, and she has not seen him in seven years. He's being what he is, a soldier, and she a grandmother, freed from the bonds of her marriage, wizened by the end of her life, when she complains of her body giving out when her soul is ready for another entire life. After all that she has been through.

The starkness of the fact of so many lives in demoralizing situations - persevering, and the fact of how quickly privilege squeezes life from us, makes me wince a little when I think of the inconvenience I sometimes feel when going to work. Most of the people on this planet feel fortunate to have a sustenance, while I might be brazen enough to have my own guru, to dwell on a good life, to deign to be anything I choose, to believe I can choose. Were I prone to excuse making, I'd call it a natural balance, but there is nothing natural about oppression, nothing. There is a vast chasm between what I need to live and what an average Afghan can ever expect, and it is hard to understand why and difficult to imagine anyone belongs in a 21 room mansion when elsewhere 4 families live in two small rooms with a well a mile away.

Nature balances herself with growth, death, cycles, but never with willful oppression. This is another call to take an example from nature, to be grateful for what we do have, to take only what we need.