In that my spiritual sensibility has for a long time resembled Buddhism more than anything else, I must say that the recent robbery of our home confronted me with the relationship of suffering to personal attachment in unexpected ways. (For those who don’t know: Siddhartha Gautama, the man whom followers refer to as the Buddha, cited personal attachment as the root cause of all human suffering.)
I wasn’t “myself” for a while after the robbery. My emotions swung between murderous anger, deep sadness and grief, each bound in a cold, wet, constricting blanket of helplessness. My response was been symptomatic of depression. I couldn’t get enough sleep, no matter how much I got. I tended to withdraw into myself, even when I was with my family. Nothing was funny. When others were enjoying a conversation or a laugh together, I couldn’t relate. Something in me seemed broken, and I didn’t know what it was. Sometimes I felt like I was at that stage of freezing to death where one is unaware of pain—just weary, tired of everything and wanting to go to sleep forever.
It wasn’t about losing “stuff”. We got it all back. And even before we got it all back it wasn’t about losing stuff.
To me it was about seeing our back door kicked in. It was about Anne’s and Asher’s bags being cavalierly opened, the contents thoughtlessly, inconsiderately strewn all over the floor of the living room. It was about the intruders rifling through boxes of family pictures where there were no valuables to be found. It was about unconcerned, underdeveloped hominids invading our sanctuary, creating a big mess for us to clean up after. It was about the sense of violation. It was about the cavalier disrespect of our peace and privacy.
This really, really, really pissed me off. I am really, really, really attached to my idea of acceptable behavior regarding respect for peace and privacy.
Many species of the animal world — perhaps even some among our own species — may not, in fact, have the mental/psychological/spiritual capacity to respect and share my ideals. I understand that it’s futile to try to get them to cooperate. I’m happy to let them do their thing in their own realm, but when they seek entrance to mine, my rules apply.
I will defend my realm of peace and sanctuary. To intruders I will communicate in terms — verbal and/or physical — that their behavior indicates they understand. I will calibrate my response to the level of threat they seem to pose.
Peace is for the subscribers to the notion of peace; mercy is for those who clearly respond to the offering of mercy. If the behavior of an intruder indicates need for me to make a snap judgment opting for violence in my response, I accept that my judgment is fallible—I might respond more violently than every I would under circumstances that allowed time for more dispassionate analysis. But if I’m going to make a mistake, in a snap-judgment circumstance, it will not be the mistake of underestimating the potential threat.
I would prefer that violence was never appropriate in the conducting of human affairs. I grieve the fact that my personal preferences hold no sway over The Way Things Are. All is right with the world. Everything that is, is as it should be—all things considered, at any given point in time.
Incidentally, in the interest of full disclosure: had the twerps who robbed us gotten to my studio and taken guitars, etc., THEN it would be about the “stuff.”
;-)
