If you have been able to live today doing
something proactively for someone, which cannot be repaid to you, then you have
led a meaningful day.
This morning, while on our walk, we spotted
a home, outside which someone had drawn a beautiful kolam (a design, a.k.a rangoli
if it is drawn with colors, drawn on the ground using rice powder – a prevalent
daily practice in south India and used in north India on special occasions). A hungry
crow pecked merrily on the rice powder oblivious of the walkers who rushed
past. My wife paused to admire this beautiful sight. She remarked to me: “Look,
how meaningful is this ritual of drawing a kolam
using rice powder. It serves the purpose of beautifying the front of the home
no doubt, but it works as a simple method to feed ants and birds.”
As we continued on our walk, I reflected on
the thinker-guru, Eknath Easwaran’s
(1910~1999; it’s also his birthday today) book The Compassionate Universe that I had read some time ago. Easwaran
had written: “My grandmother lived in a Universe filled with Life. It was
impossible for her to conceive of any creature — even the smallest insect, let
alone a human being — as insignificant. In every leaf, flower, animal, and star
she saw the expression of a compassionate Universe, whose laws were not
competition and survival of the fittest but cooperation, artistry, and thrift.
. . .The earth was our home, she would have said, but no less was it
home to the oxen that pulled our plows or the elephants that roamed in the
forest and worked for us. They lived with us
as partners whose well-being was inseparable from our own.”
And so, this morning, I learnt the value of
the ritual of drawing a kolam with
rice powder. Most people of today’s generation have given up on this practice
as they perhaps find it boring or irrelevant or both. But this is a practice,
as I understand it now, that sows the seeds of compassion early on and helps
you to not just think for yourself but to think for the entire ecosystem. To be
compassionate is to do something meaningful, proactively, selflessly, in such a
manner that it can never be repaid to you. Compassion is when the love within
you – for creation, for the Universe, for all beings – overflows. Even if you
can’t do anything physical for anyone, just sending them positive energy is
compassion.
Being compassionate in these times needs more
intent than just reason. And our compassion is urgently required to make this
world a better place. There’s something compassionate you and I can do today, right
now, apart from possibly drawing a rice powder kolam outside our homes – we can send positive energy and a long
distance hug to all those parents and families in Peshawar who lost their
children in yesterday’s dastardly Taliban attack. If
misplaced passion, as in the case of the Taliban, can continue to cause
destruction, our compassion can and will heal the world!
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