Mindful thinking

What a week it has been in my world, one of false dichotomies, joy and sorrow, birth and death. At times such as these, I am glad I am not a black and white thinker. 


Wednesday I watched in amazement as my lovely Springer Spaniel Feebee gave birth to six tiny puppies. The next day the earth trembled and the movement gave rise to a huge tsunami affecting the north eastern part of Japan and taking countless lives. 


As separate as these events are, in essence they serve to emphasize what we as humans can sometimes forget -- this is life. It is all part of the continuum we find ourselves in from the moment we take our first shivering breath to the instant when our breaths cease. And as miraculous as it was to see these wriggling, sightless creatures emerge from their mother dog, so too was observing the live video from the air above the Sendai airport and the coastline of Miyagi prefecture depicting small aircraft strewn about like model ones and ships banging around and into each other while the wave of furious water demolished homes, cars and roads in its path.


Destruction like that, a miracle? Not in the sense of having a beneficent effect in its wrath, but rather that it was not worse. One can argue that such a seemingly merciless occurrence which has ravaged so many lives can have no positive effect going forward, but that is an example of how humans tend to think in such extremes. Was it horrific to watch and think about the people who were killed by this natural force? Yes. Sad? Unspeakably, yes. Did the world end? No. We humans are resilient; we rebuild and go on.


Life began for six small puppies, much-wanted and from parent dogs whose breeding is such that their offspring will be lovely, even-tempered adults dogs one day. Feebee as a first time mother didn't know what was happening as her contractions got serious and the first puppy was pushed from her body. She yelped and barked with pain, but then as soon as she smelled the wet warmth of this moments old male pup, she began to lick him and clean him with vigor. She nosed him to her side and he blindly squirmed to a nipple, latched on and sucked for all he was worth. I can't describe the surge of feeling I felt for her, the mother and for the five other babies as they eventually made their way into the world. Pride. Love. Compassion. 


Many people routinely engage in such either/or, black and white thinking. They feel boundless optimism when things are going well. They can just as quickly sink into total despair with the first setback. For them, things and people are all good or all bad.


We would do well to move more towards more of the dialectical style of thinking subscribed to by many Asian cultures. In the words of the Buddha himself, " We are what we think, all that arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world."