Something happened to me about four decades ago, and not a week has passed when it hasn’t crossed my mind.
I was in Bali, Indonesia, with my girlfriend. As evening fell we caught a pedicab and headed into town. As is my habit, I began talking with the driver about himself and his day.
In the TV version of this story the setup should have me in the grumpy zone: I’d be caught up in work stuff, or fighting on our holiday, or simply a spoiled person from the rich world who couldn’t figure out how to enjoy paradise. It wasn’t like that, though. My girlfriend and I were in a pretty good mood, staying in a cheap place near the beach, and fully aware we were in paradise. Maybe that’s why the story stayed with me.
Our driver was made out of happiness. He’d gotten enough fares that day that he could knock off a little early, and make it back home to see his daughter before she went to sleep. That was all, but from the way he expressed his anticipation, I could see it was big, it was everything. Set against our normal standards of happiness, it was almost a delirium, you might even say, relative to the reward he anticipated.
Almost a delirium. A couple of centuries ago an English writer named Christopher Smart, now best known for his charming and crazy poem about his cat, took to falling to his knees in the street and praying out loud. When he was eventually committed to an asylum, his friend Samuel Johnson commented that “madness frequently discovers itself merely by unnecessary deviation from the usual modes of the world.” Shouted prayers, to both Smart and Johnson, made more sense than the lonely silence in which many people just got on with the next damn thing.
I can’t speak for the pedicab driver’s life or character, except for the example his behavior set. My girlfriend and I left the pedicab shaken in the best way, reminded of the blooming abundance around us, if only we opened ourselves to it. We felt chastened, sure, but the joy in what he expressed, like a good bodhisattva, was an evanescent but durable example, not a scold. Every day, everywhere there is something.
Have I been true to his example? No, and I can’t be sure he was true to it the next day. Maybe everybody is somebody’s unwitting bodhisattva for a moment, nudging them forward in the world without even knowing it. For sure, I have not forgotten for a week his embrace of a gratitude so strong it was a force in nature. And it’s true: Gratitude costs nothing, rewards immeasurably, and doesn't exhaust from overuse. No one ever lay on their deathbed wishing they hadn’t been so damn grateful.
By very rough calculation, that happened to me 1.3 billion heartbeats ago. The Earth, which moves around the Sun at 67,000 miles an hour, has traveled 23.5 billion miles since then. That unimaginable distance is about 0.01% of a trip from this solar system to the next star, where there probably isn’t a habitable planet anyway, in case you think the aliens are coming. We’re here with each other, that’s it, in a place that is utterly abundant if we can figure out how to embrace it.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
dawww, how nice.