Contributed by Greg Mileski
Harmful beings are everywhere like space itself.
Impossible it is that all should be suppressed.
But let this angry mind alone be overthrown,
And it’s as though all foes have been subdued.
To cover all the earth with sheets of leather—
Where could such amounts of skin be found?
But with the leather soles of just my shoes
It is as though I cover all the earth!
And thus the outer course of things
I myself cannot restrain.
But let me just restrain my mind,
And what is left to be restrained?
--The Way of the Bodhisattva, 5.12-14
***In these verses, Shantideva, the author of the eighth-century CE work The Way of the Bodhisattva, is grappling with the reality of harm-causing agents. His realization that he’ll never be able to oppose them, or change their behaviors, seems at first like a cause for despair. But Shantideva comes to advocate a different approach. Instead, he will focus on his reactions to their harm. He compares them to all the potential dangers lurking where one might walk—rocks and shards of glass, say. It wouldn’t make sense, he reasons, to try to protect his feet by covering the whole world in leather; but by putting on a good pair of shoes, he can travel anywhere! In the same way, by focusing on his mind, he can much better protect himself—and so also others—from any potential harms.****
“Thank you,” he called out from his police SUV. “You’re welcome. And thank you for your service.” Those aren’t words that easily pass my lips. Don’t get me wrong, anybody who is willing to put themselves in harm’s way to protect folks like me that they don’t even know earns high marks in my book, but I’m just not a “thank you for your service” kind of guy. In the last few years, though, I’ve gotten used to parrying praise I hear while walking down the street, giving simple responses and moving on when they thank me.
The school where our children go is only a couple of blocks from our apartment in Boston, so my spouse and I have long walked our kids to school each day. Even now that they’re old enough to do it on their own—and there’s a crossing guard for the busy intersection—we still make the walk together, which is sometimes annoying to the kids who want to show how grown-up they can be.
And while I’ve always really enjoyed the simple beauty of this act, not very long ago our walks were tinged by anger. No, not at the loose relationship Boston drivers have with red lights—I’ve made my peace with that—but at something that is an everyday sight for many of us: trash. Walking these blocks between our home and their school, the sidewalks were littered with, well, litter. Everywhere. Doritos bags, Dunkin’s cups, smashed cans of energy drinks, and a seemingly endless supply of those little liquor bottles, nips. “Who would just throw this out on the street!?” went an almost daily shrill in my mind. “Some people have no respect for others.” “I can’t believe...” You get the idea. I would walk along with my family and shake my head in righteous anger at the litterbugs among us. Oh, of course, I wasn’t exactly raging—it’s part of every town and city and probably goes as far back as human beings go—but there was for these fifteen minutes a hum in my brain of mild to moderate annoyance. And it was an annoyance aimed at… well, I don’t know who exactly, but at them… those people… who littered!
“Why doesn’t somebody do something!?” I once found myself muttering to nobody. I’d had this thought before, and I knew the next logical step, but I always turned my mind away before I had to actually face it. But, eventually, just as the way water will slowly carve a canyon, this little thought worked on me. “I guess, after all, I’m a somebody, and I can do something.”
So I went on Amazon and bought one of those long grabber-arms. (Actually I bought two because they come in two-packs apparently, and for a while my Amazon suggestions were all cable-knit cardigans and large-button remote controls, and other things marketed toward the elderly.) And when it arrived I faced my fear of looking like a weirdo, and began walking the kids to school with a trash bag in one hand and my grabber in the other. It took a couple of days to get the hang of it, but pretty soon I was walking and picking up nipper bottles without breaking stride. Plastic cup lids, discarded and lost pieces of paper, empty cigarette packs, all of them went into that week’s trash bag. I learned to avoid obviously dirty food wrappings after some critter re-littered my front porch, where I store the bag until the end of the week. I don’t pick up every piece of garbage and I avoid rainy or snowy weather—otherwise I just wind up with a bag of disgusting water the next day—but this is my walking-to-school activity. And when I get to the kids’ school I often take a walk around the entrance and playground area, snagging a piece of trash here or there.
This is what made the police officer say, “Thank you.” It’s made a lot of people say thank you over the last couple of years. “What a simple act of kindness you’re doing!” “I should start doing that when we get our steps in!” “Wow, you’re really making a difference!”
But here’s the thing: I’m not really making any difference at all. Believe me, I fill up my bag every week! Oh sure, I am taking one bag’s worth of trash off the street and putting it into a landfill—which I suppose is somewhat better—but there is always—and I mean ALWAYS!!!—more trash. I am not, in any meaningful way, making our neighborhood any less trashy. I’m just not.
But… that little voice is gone. Walking to school, that low hum of annoyance is silenced and I’m free to think other thoughts. Rather than spending fifteen minutes of every morning casting some anonymous jerk as my enemy, I’m noticing the hedges I’m snagging paper out of. Instead of being filled with righteous anger, I am remembering that sometimes garbage has blown out of my car when I’ve put the windows down. Where I was once shaking my head at humanity, I am greeting passersby with a smile and the occasional, “Good morning!”
I let people say thank you, of course; they have the best of intentions showing their gratitude. But the trashy little secret is that I’m really not doing this for anybody but myself. The difference I am making is in my own mood, in my own mind. And if I’m starting my day with a different mindset, one not rooted in my own sense of righteous judgment but in something more humble, more cooperative, more tolerant, then what kinds of actions and words are more likely to result? I don’t know, but I think they’re just a little more likely to be words and actions of compassion and understanding.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a favorable remote control review to write.
~
Greg Mileski is a doctoral candidate and teacher in the Boston College Theology Department where he studies issues within the Buddhist-Christian dialogue. His academic work has appeared in Dialog and the Journal of Interreligious Studies, as well as elsewhere. He is ordained in the Lutheran tradition (ELCA) and enjoys preaching with a Buddhist accent, and he is a contributor to the upcoming poetry anthology Thin Places & Sacred Spaces (Amethyst Press, 2024). He is also managing editor for Religion and the Arts.