Enlightenment is when a wave realizes it is the ocean. (Thich Nhat Hanh)
My mind travels in unplanned directions as I drive familiar routes. My car goes where it needs to go. And my imagination moves forward and backward. I am en route to the grocery.
On the right side of the road an elderly couple walk along the sidewalk. The gentleman uses a walker. Her arm reaches around his shoulder.
I feel the reality of universal emotion as if it were a new notion. When I was a child we didn’t talk about emotional experience in my family. I believed adults were innately different than children. Taller creatures knew the rules and never knelt backward on a pew in church to see behind them. Stoic was an unspoken virtue.
Grownups laughed at jokes and never explain unfamiliar phrases. At family events kids sat at a smaller table on chairs that tipped easier. We dropped more and were ready for dessert sooner.
Yet, these were the superficial differences. Constant separations told me we were disparate creatures. I was told what to think and how to be. Feelings came up only when they didn’t fit what Mommy wanted.
A strange form of enlightenment came later. A fluid one. Like water. It didn’t arrive at a place I can find again and describe. Understanding, truth, and empathy are not static. Surface waves. Tidal waves. Some moments almost unbearable, others healing. And all belonged to a whole larger than I am. A vast ocean of tested and untested experience.
I arrive in the same parking-lot I’ve seen uncountable times. The sky leaks a few raindrops.
“Good afternoon,” I call to a woman returning her cart. I am lucky. She returns the greeting.
This moment will move into the next. Will I give to the whole as I travel, or not? I will if I am aware that I am the ocean.
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