Meditation

3 June 2008
Tuesday

Yesterday I found myself in a dentist's chair undergoing a root canal "procedure". It did not go well. The specialist working on me spoke of "tortuous canals", and an "unusual anatomy". Then there was the "calcification" he had to contend with. That did not sound pretty. Not the sort of thing I wanted to hear about my canals, and my anatomy - especially from a man in a mask with a drill in one hand and a sharp pointy thing in the other. Oh, and there was another thing I didn't want to hear. After more than an hour into the ordeal he said, "Well, I've managed to get two of the nerve roots, but the third one is really very difficult to get to."

I recalled the Buddhist proverb: On a journey through three roots and three canals, count two as half way...or something like that.

Forty-five minutes later it was over. Two hours and fifteen minutes all told, but who's counting?

The procedure lasted twice as long as both I and the dentist had expected. While I was not in physical pain (that came later...as in now), it was emotionally grueling, and to some extent, given my own personal history, somewhat traumatizing. Yet, it was bearable because I was not alone. Yes, there was a skilled dentist doing his best to minimize my torment. And there was a very nice assistant with kind eyes, and a welcomed efficiency to her every motion. They were there, but not in the way that a boy from Uganda, Stephen Batte, was there with me through it all.

As it happened, just prior to the procedure I was reading an article about this boy, Stephen. He is nine. He spends his days breaking rocks in a quarry near Kampala. All day long he breaks small rocks into smaller rocks. Like the convicts in the old movies, he has been sentenced to a life at hard labor. Only no court has passed judgment on him. Rather, he is the collateral damage from a civil war. For five years now - more than half his life - he has been working on this rock pile. Perhaps no diamond cutter, yet he does tap his homemade hammer just so onto a larger rock splitting it into smaller bits. A five-gallon bucket full of newly minted gravel garners him the princely sum of six cents. He fills three buckets during each twelve-hour day. Stephen's mother died not long ago in an accident at the quarry, and after that his stepfather abandoned him. So, he is alone now.

A few minutes after seeing the image in the paper of this boy sitting on the small pile of rocks, his stick hammer poised for another strike, he came into my mind again while sitting in the dental chair waiting for the next quick injection of novocaine. At first it was a ...well, if he can sit in the hot sun all day and break rocks without complaining, I can sit through this... kind of thought. I quickly realized how that sort of objectification was terribly self-serving, and not at all useful.

As the procedure proceeded, though, the image of this boy returned again and again. Finally, I began to feel myself in the presence of an enormous wave of compassion. It wasn't that I was being compassionate. Instead, I felt that somehow we were both enfolded in a larger mantle of compassion. That his suffering and my torment lived in the spaces well beyond, and also in between, the tapping and the drilling - in the empty spaces where we are all connected.

When I was able for a moment to let go of comparing one suffering against another, my pile of rocks compared with his, I was able sit quietly in those folds and hold him in my mind as another being in the world, another co-conspirator in this illusion of our distinctness and our differences. I found myself with tears in my eyes when I thought of the comment he made to the reporter, "Life has always been hard here..." Just so.

It's just that in that moment the here was there. And now here is here again. And I notice that the opening, that space between spaces, is still here, still open. I may not be able to do anything today about that rock pile in Uganda, but perhaps I will come upon another child today, or another being of any age for that matter, with a rock pile of their own that I might help diminish. And who knows, perhaps my own pile will diminish as well.

We can make meaning of our lives only when we open ourselves to all the joys and sufferings of the world - our own and those of others we will never know.

What I do know now is that a root canal is just a procedure, just dharma.

Update: On the way home from the office this afternoon a boy turned to me at the bus stop, and said, "Aren't you Mr. Edd, the man who traveled all over?" I looked quizzical for a second, and then I recognized him. (His name escaped me - still a little foggy from the medication. Oh, I think it is Saleem.) We had met several months ago at this same spot. Back then he had asked me if I had ever traveled outside the country. I said that I had, and then we talked about my travels in the past and his dreams for the future. This afternoon we picked up that conversation about his dreams for the future. My rock pile was smaller by the time he got off at his stop.

Here is a link to the newspaper article. And here is another one.