High Street Drama

Walking up our usually peaceful High Street recently I passed a man exuding anger and impatience. Not too far past him was a woman struggling to get out of her mobility scooter. She seemed to be tangled with a dog lead behind her. No longer able to contain himself, the man stormed over to her, cursing loudly, calling her names one should never hear on the Hight Street, or anywhere else, for that matter.

I had passed her now and turned around to see what he was doing to her. I felt protective. Two women who had been walking in front of me also stopped to look. After a minute or so one said to the other, “I don’t think we should get involved,” and they continued up the street.

I agreed that it would not be wise to confront the man, which would no doubt lead to escalation and possibly physical violence. He was a big man, his entire structure demonstrating degrees of rage I would not want to get close to. I still felt protective.

I found myself sending metta, a Buddhist term often translated as loving-kindness.

I saw three or four men standing close to him and imagined they were also feeling protective. Then I realized they could not get by him, as he had angrily thrown his backpack into the path. He extended his swearing to them and kicked his pack out of their way.

I could see the woman was finding her way to standing with the support of her cane as the man roughly untangled the dog and its lead.

Last Year’s Metta

My thoughts moved to my dear late husband, Franklyn, who a year ago had been very ill in hospital. He probably knew he was dying although no one spoke of this. It was just weeks before he passed. He was in pain, and too weak to get out of bed. There was a man on the ward who was screaming much of the time. I heard his screams one day as I arrived to visit Franklyn. I was worried my husband would be upset. Instead, I found him smiling. “I’ve been sending him metta,” he revealed.

He was such a man. Even as he was in pain and dying, he was sending metta to someone he saw as even more misfortunate than he.

The memory on the High Street was that much more relevant because my back had gone into spasm a few days earlier and I was walking up the High Street slowly and gingerly, trying to reduce the pain. There was, however, no hesitation about sending metta to this disturbed couple.

After a few minutes, the man seemed to calm down. I felt my job was done. I continued up the High Street to negotiate my grocery shopping. The physical pain persisted but my heart felt peaceful and happy.

May We All Be Happy

The words accompanying metta practice are often along the lines of:

May all beings be happy.

May all beings be peaceful.

May all beings be free.

Franklyn used to say, “May we all know our inherent freedom and luminosity.”

I offer this prayer now to all of us, all inhabiting this suffering, changing planet, and all beings, those we know about and those we don’t.

I strongly feel that, if we could all enable ourselves to settle into presence enough to offer mettawhere it is needed, which often starts with ourselves, our inherent health and original potential would be revealed. Imagine, for example, if every newborn baby was welcomed by a team of kind people exuding loving-kindness, instead of anxiously analyzing, poking, measuring, pulling, twisting, etc. We might create a different, happier world just by properly welcoming those arriving in our world! We could also offer metta to politicians, criminals, AI (?), and other challenging entities in our lives.

Will you join me in intending metta?

I include you in my metta prayer. May you be happy. May you be peaceful. May you know your inherent freedom and luminosity.

I invite you in joining me in being curious about how these words and this intention lands in you. Does anything change in your sense of yourself? Your body? Your breath? Your relationship with Mama Earth? What changes? What does metta mean to you?

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