I was taking a walk thru Golden Gate Park this week thinking about story.\u00c2\u00a0 I was letting my mind wander then noticing the stories it came up with and trying to notice the relation of the stories to myself, my perceived image of myself, and to space [or at least my perceived image of the space around the moments that made up the stories both initially and in the remembering].<\/p>\n
At the end of my walk I went to Starbucks and the line was rather long.\u00c2\u00a0 At the front of the line there was a man who was clearly not happy with his order and the service. He was raising is voice and red of face as he argued with the Starbucks Employee.\u00c2\u00a0 I watched as space around him got smaller.\u00c2\u00a0 People began to back away from him, offering him more space [as if they too noticed the space collapsing around him – and around them, by default thru proximity].\u00c2\u00a0 Possibilities for other storylines vanished as he married himself to the one storyline more and more with every word he spoke.<\/p>\n
And then I noticed something.\u00c2\u00a0 Normally this kind of scene would have annoyed me beyond words.\u00c2\u00a0 But instead, this time, I was filled with compassion.\u00c2\u00a0 Having just spent the past hour walking and noticing my own stories and my attachments to them as real, I understood in that moment how hard it is to see a story as having any other space or possibility around it.\u00c2\u00a0 It immediately called to my mind my own moments of retail combat. And, overcome with compassion for this enraged man, I was suddenly over come with compassion for myself – for all those times in the past where I was the enraged customer or employee or family member.<\/p>\n
A few years ago I spent sometime interviewing for a documentary Namkha Drimed Rinpoche<\/a> and had the opportunity at the end of one interviews to ask him a personal question.\u00c2\u00a0 I asked him how I could remember in the moment of being completely annoyed that the storyline was just a story in my head, that the feeling was impermanent, so as not to create a scene akin to the man at Starbucks.\u00c2\u00a0 The main point of his response to me was Compassion.\u00c2\u00a0 I thought to my self, compassion is easier said than done when I’m in the moment of being annoyed… but for the first time that day in Starbucks, I saw a glimpse of what he meant.<\/p>\n Diana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was taking a walk thru Golden Gate Park this week thinking about story.\u00c2\u00a0 I was letting my mind wander then noticing the stories it came up with and trying to notice the relation of the stories to myself, my … Continue reading