When I witness the suffering caused by the likes of Putin, and other powers and potentates in other parts of the world, I feel the suffering of the victims. It hurts and depresses me. I’m quite unable to take the view: ‘Why should I worry? It isn’t happening to me so why bother?’ because the universe in its wisdom endowed me with the curse of empathy, and so I can’t help feeling the pain and injustice visited on others. And when I’m hurting, my first instinct is to hurt back. I can’t help that either, at least not yet.
That’s the problem; that’s what’s troubling me. The better part of me doesn’t want to hurt back. It wants me to follow the Buddhist doctrine of non-judgemental observation. It wants me to see even Putin as yet another victim of an imperfect world.
So my question to myself is this: Do I have sufficient time left to achieve the goal of exercising non-judgemental observation? It contains a sublime irony because the more I see of a world being run by rabid dogs, the more urgently I feel the need to be getting the hell out of here.
Maybe the universe will choose to teach me in time, or maybe the increasingly popular simulation theory will do the job. If I can look at a glorious landscape and question its right to be regarded as real, maybe I can learn to apply the same process to suffering.
Time will tell. Walking on.
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