The S&R volunteers took turns being strapped into a jungle penetrator and then being lifted into the belly of the bird. A jungle penetrator is a 90-pound steel cylinder with three bars that fold out to form a makeshift seat, used extensively, I believe, in the Vietnam War. When it came my turn, the sergeant helped to strap me into the penetrator and to hook the penetrator to the cable. He then gave the go-ahead. I traveled upward about 35 feet when the cable shook and shimmied and I was suddenly flying free.

The rest is search-and-rescue history.

During my recovery, which lasted well over a year, numerous individuals suggested that I consider legal action, presumably against the Army, although the county where I volunteered might also have been one of the suggested targets. But I didn’t see that as an option. Workers’ comp covered my medical expenses. My body did the rest, though a great deal of the credit goes to the medical community and to the folks in the community where I lived. Mostly all I suffer now is residual aches and pains. But I’m in my 50s, so that pretty much goes with the territory.

I don’t bring all this up, particularly the litigation part, for recognition or pats on the back or a sudden infusion of cash—not that a little extra money wouldn’t be appreciated. I bring it up because I was reminded of these events recently when I read that a Connecticut attorney might try to sue the state for $100 million on behalf of one of the survivors of the Newtown shooting.

The reason, according to the lawyer, was not about money, but rather about improving school security and living in a safer world. I assumed that meant those benefiting from the lawsuit’s windfall would be donating their cut to help bring about these changes.

Yet the potential for nonprofit profit-sharing was not the first thought that occurred to me upon hearing about the possible litigation. Rather, I focused on the fact that only two weeks after the shooting someone was already stepping forward to sue. And that’s what made me think of my own experience and the preponderance of opinion that had encouraged me to do the same.

What is it about tragedy that some would seek to turn it into opportunity? Do we have so little capacity to accept that bad things can happen that the only way to respond is to lash out? Or does it have more to do with a belief that the opportunity to profit is fundamentally ingrained in the American dream and therefore trumps all other considerations?

When I was confronted with the possibility of litigation, I found the idea fairly ludicrous. I knew what risks I was taking when I volunteered. Why should I be assigning blame now? And what would litigation mean to other search-and-rescue operations? Would the state’s S&R teams be less willing to take chances to save lives? Would the Army refuse to help local S&R efforts should someone become injured or lost?

All of which leads me back to Newtown. If the State of Connecticut has to shell out $100 million, plus all the related legal expenses, that money has got to come from somewhere. Even with their $40 billion budget, they already face a $365 million shortfall. Where will they come up with the extra cash? The already shrinking school funds? Other critical services?

Throughout our lives, we’re presented with choices—and sometimes those choices are whether to act in our own self-interest or in consideration of those around us. Sure, the world is seldom so black-and-white, and our actions have ramifications whatever we decide. And there are certainly times when litigation is warranted. Yet there are moments too when we’re presented with clear options, when we know that we can either act with compassion and concern or act according to our desires and ambitions. We’re going to screw up, certainly. We screw up all the time. I screw up all the time. But that doesn’t make my options any less clear. And when I hear about such things as the lawsuit in Connecticut, I grow concerned that self-interest might be winning out altogether. Even the fact that the attorney has now dropped the suit doesn’t ease my mind a great deal.

But then I think of those Sandy Hook heroes who put their lives on the line to save the schoolchildren. And I think about the teachers and nurses and counselors and social workers and first responders and emergency workers and firefighters and police officers and soldiers and the countless others who’ve given their time and their lives to make the world better for the rest of us, and for a moment, I can forget those who would capitalize on tragedy and despair, and instead be grateful that there are still people out there who inspire me and encourage me and fill me with hope and admiration and the willingness to do better next time I’m faced with a making a decision.

I knew something was up before the first bullet flew. I heard sirens crisscrossing the nearby streets and the annoying bleat of a news helicopter circling above. So I headed to my computer and checked a few local websites. That’s when I learned a coyote had been wandering the Seattle streets, with sightings not far from my home, including the park where I often walk, the park we were now warned to avoid.

I tried to return to work. But then received a text from one of my neighbors. He pointed me to a website with the latest news about our four-legged fugitive. I followed the link to a local blog. The situation had been resolved.

At first, I didn’t realize it was a shooting. That’s because of the way a USDA spokesperson had announced the outcome: the coyote had been “found and removed.” But clarification came shortly thereafter. Removed, yes. Terminated, more so. Killed, most definitely.

But here’s the clincher. The reason the feds took out the offending critter was not because of reported attacks on robins or roadrunners or the occasional jogger, but because the animal had appeared old and sick. Like a patch of dying sage. Like the gnarled roots of a burnt-out cedar.

Not being versed in coyote behavior or in the risks one might pose to people and their pets, I’m hesitant to comment one way or the other on whether the hit had been the best strategy. I do know that a family of coyotes resides in my neighborhood, in the same park where the ailing animal had been spotted, but they’ve been generally welcomed because they control the rat and rabbit populations. They also make for good local news copy. Yet I still can’t ignore the shooting’s justification, that the animal was aged and ailing, justification enough, it seems, to sanction a final solution.

Yet I don’t want to put too sensationalistic a spin on the story… Oh, hell. What’s the media machine for if not to prod and provoke and provide a bit of entertainment? I mean, think about it. The feds take out the coyote because it appears old and sick. They search and shoot and ship it off to coyote heaven. I can imagine the agent standing there, with his square jaw, his tinted shades, his semi-automatic rifle. Hasta la vista, baby.

Could I ask for a more apt analogy or slicker segue?

When I heard about the reason for the coyote’s demise, I quickly turned my attention to our own elderly, the human kind, and the parallels in thinking. I’m not suggesting the feds have hired a group of thugs to take out our retirees with their Winchesters and Remingtons and Marlin rimfires. I’m referring more to the spirit of “removed” and our propensity to separate our elderly from ourselves, both physically and psychologically, our tendency to distance ourselves from them, ignore and dismiss them, treat them as pariah, as diseased, as untouchable. Our veneration of youth not only warps our perceptions of ourselves and those around us, but also castigates the members of society who’ve fallen from grace for no other reason than their accumulated years.

In the one-character play Shirley Valentine, written by Willy Russell, the heroine is a middle-aged working-class housewife whose life has become stagnant and without purpose and value. Her children have grown and moved away. Her husband still works full time. She spends hour-upon-hour at home, by herself, with little to do but talk to the kitchen walls:

An’ most of us die…long before we’re dead. An’ what kills us is the terrible weight of all this unused life that we carry around.

But Shirley gets lucky. Her friend wins a two-week vacation to Greece and takes her along on what turns out to be a life-changing adventure.

For those long past middle age, such an adventure is no longer probable, if not impossible, yet they continue to carry with them this “terrible weight,” fueled as it is by the attitudes and treatment they face every day.

In his book Why Survive? Being Old in America, Robert Butler gives insight and meaning into the rampant growth of ageism in America:

A process of systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people because they are old, just as racism and sexism accomplish this with skin color and gender. Old people are categorized as senile, rigid in thought and manner, old-fashioned in morality and skills…Ageism allows the younger generations to see older people as different from themselves; thus they subtly cease to identify with their elders as human beings.

Butler published his book in 1975, over 35 years ago. Maybe the issue isn’t as bad now as it was back then. Maybe it’s worse. I don’t know. Yet there’s little to convince me it’s gotten better.

But let’s put that issue aside for a moment. After all, who among us is not already aware of the way we treat our seniors? Of the terrible toll that such treatment is taking?

Of greater concern to many of us—those already standing on the western shores or those quickly heading there—is not what we can do to change such attitudes but what we can do to cope with them. In that sense, aging is like any other aspect of life: when we stand ourselves against external measures, we always come up short. So we don’t compare. And we try not to let ourselves succumb to this cultural stigma and instead seek out those reservoirs of strength inside ourselves. What choice do we have if we are to survive the onslaught of indifference and indignation?

And all this from a dead canine.

So I headed back to my computer to research the scuttlebutt on successful aging, a phrase, it turns out, that returns more than 6 million Google hits, in a mere .31 seconds. Clearly, I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about this issue.

How is it we suddenly need so much help with aging? How is it that a process we’ve been undergoing as a species since before we were conscious enough to know what aging meant now requires instructions? I mean, it’s not like we used to come with manuals and they’ve suddenly been lost or are now available only online or we left them in the pocket of our jeans and washed and dried them along with that cell number we never wanted to lose.

Clearly, something has shifted. Is it because we’re living longer? Is it because of the crappy way we treat our elders? Is it because we’ve become a culture so reliant on outside direction and stimuli that even as we age we seek absolution elsewhere?

In an agewell.com article on aging and spirituality (“Spirituality: Forgotten Factor in Successful Aging”), we’re told about a talk given by Dr. Michael Parker from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Center for Aging. In his short speech, Parker describes what are considered the three pillars of successful aging: avoiding disease and disability, staying engaged in life, and maximizing physical and cognitive fitness. Sounds pretty good so far.

But Parker believes there’s a fourth pillar: spirituality. Numerous studies, he says, suggest that people who maintain an active spiritual life seem to have a more positive aging experience.

Maybe that’s why we now need instructions on how to age. We’ve replaced our sense of the spiritual with shopping malls and the Internet and reality TV, with smartphones and Netflix and Pepcid AC, all with one aim: to look outside ourselves for answers, for satisfaction, for directions on how to think and feel and experience the world.

And if that’s what we bring to the aging process, it’s no wonder the transition can be so painful. It’s no wonder we need to be told what to do and how to do it.

So perhaps turning toward a more spiritual life is the key. Google certainly thinks so. Yet what it means to be spiritual is as unique as each individual who pursues a spiritual ideal. Even getting us to agree on that ideal is a task that seems beyond our capacity, given our centuries of trying. And given the way we’ve been trained. We’re lucky we can make any reasonable choices, let alone make sense of the plethora of information out there.

During my Google interlude, I also happened upon a definition of the spirit that I sort of like. It comes from Jennifer L. Brower, a Unitarian Universalist minister living on Long Island:

If we understand the “spirit” to mean the animating or vital force within each person—“spirit” derived from the Latin spiritus, meaning “soul, courage, vigor, breath”—then the spirit is our vital center or our core. And the “spiritual” are those things which support that center; those things which enliven us and give us a sense of courage, or heart, for our living. Spiritual experiences are those events in life and moments in relationships which attune us to that vital or animating force within and which give greater meaning and depth to our day-to-day living.

Brower believes that advancing age often leads to rethinking and re-evaluating our lives and what has guided us religiously or spiritually, that the process of aging inevitably changes our spiritual life, whether the result is an affirmation of religious teachings or an increased dissonance and discomfort with those teachings. Or it might have nothing to do with religious teachings. The key, it seems, is in going along with how the spirit moves us, regardless of the direction that takes.

Maybe there’s something to this—embracing a more spiritual perspective on life as we age. Or embracing a more spiritual life regardless of our age. Or embracing something. Compassion. Humanity. Star Trek.

Clearly, as a culture that treats its elderly the way we do—along with the sick and poor and otherwise disadvantaged—something is not working. And I have a hard time believing that more electronic gadgets and high-definition TVs and trips to the plastic surgeon will make matters better.

During my Googling, I also came across a quote from Mark Twain, a man who lived till he was 75:

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

Yeah, it’s sad all right. But what are we going to do? I bet the coyote was none too happy about it. I bet the 1.5 million elderly living in institutions are none too happy about it either. Or the 11.3 million living alone. I know I sure won’t be when I get there. Hell, I’m not happy about it now. First nature screws us over, then everybody else. Next time I sign up for this ride, I plan to read the fine print a lot closer.

The manager said nothing about vegetation of the ingestible kind.

For those not in the know, Initiative 502 makes the recreational use of marijuana legal in Washington. We voted the measure into law at the same time we voted Barack Obama into office for a second term, supporting pot and the president in about equal measure—the final tallies around 56%.

According to the Secretary of State’s office, Initiative 502 provides for the state to “license and regulate marijuana production, distribution, and possession for persons over twenty-one; remove state-law criminal and civil penalties for activities that it authorizes; tax marijuana sales; and earmark marijuana-related revenues.”

How the federal government will handle our declaration of independence is yet to be determined.

Even so, I’m glad to see we’re starting to take a reasonable approach to this issue, though I would have expected us to be further along by now, given the number of people in the US who’ve smoked or ingested weed—over 40% by some estimates—and the utter failure of pot’s prohibition to control its use. Our continued efforts would be laughable if they were not such an outright embarrassment.

According to researchers at the University of Washington, the public continues to puff away despite law enforcement’s best efforts to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate the pot peddling and pot possessing public and despite the 28,000 inmates sitting in state and federal prisons for weed-related offenses—at a cost of over $600 million each year (not including the costs associated with detaining offenders in county facilities or supervising them after their release).

Over the past 15 years, marijuana-related arrests have increased dramatically in the US, now accounting for nearly half of the 2 million drug arrests each year, yet pot is more available than ever, with a significant rise in use among US teens: One in every 15 high school seniors now smokes weed on a daily or near daily basis.

The UW researchers also found that easing up on pot prosecution or decriminalizing marijuana altogether would have little impact on the number of people imbibing in weed, thus thwarting once more the thinking behind marijuana prohibition. Legalizing marijuana would also save governments $7.7 billion annually—resources that could be redirected to more critical matters. Plus, if weed were turned into a regulated industry, states could rake in bushels of cash at a time when they need it most, while undermining the drug cartel’s black-market efforts to push pot and persecute resisters.

So, yeah, I voted in favor of Initiative 502 because it seems a far more sensible solution than our current approach, so sensible, in fact, I’m surprised we’ve taken this long to pass such a measure. Yet sense doesn’t always make for good politics or good headlines, especially in an era when reason comes in second to hysteria, when logic is knocked into the trenches and kicked in the head, when intellect falls victim to a Jacobin reign of terror, trampled and mocked as collateral damage and moral degradation.

Another ballot measure that Washington voters just approved is Referendum 74, the legalization of same-sex marriage. I was relieved to see this one pass as well, although I felt less confident it would. Discussions around this topic are seldom reasonable, even less so than for marijuana, with opponents gleefully citing Biblical passages, waving the flag of family values, and promulgating fantastical illusions of marital perfection.

We are, in fact, plagued by our diminishing ability to have sensible debate, to engage in opposing viewpoints, to take into account the other side, whether arguing about the environment or health care or Medicare or education or military buildup or countless other controversial and contentious issues. And what’s not controversial and contentious these days?

As a nation, we are split down the middle, incapable of finding a sliver of common ground, let alone common decency. Even if measures such as Initiative 502 or Referendum 74 manage to pass, nearly half of the voters still oppose their implementation, just as nearly half of the voters rage in disbelief at the re-election of Barack Obama.

Such divisiveness, no matter the degree to which it’s been orchestrated, has taken its collective toll, making it nearly impossible to reach consensus on any one issue. In the meantime, greenhouse gases worsen, poverty spreads unchecked, civil liberties deteriorate, and the distribution of wealth grows ever more disconcerting and disgraceful.

Yet a nation divided is hardly news, not to anyone who’s paying attention. Plenty of people are talking about it, writing about it, complaining about it.

But it’s not only collectively we suffer. What has perhaps not garnered as much attention is the personal toll that our divisiveness has taken. As individuals, the chasm between us has grown from the Delaware Water Gap to Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge, the mother of all abysses.

I became aware of the extent of this schism a couple years back, on a cross-country road trip that covered 25 states and over 15,000 miles, while meandering from one back road to the next, visiting friends and acquaintances from distant pasts and different lifetimes, when politics felt less divisive, less rooted in separation and hate.

Under such circumstances—on the move, sometimes wandering into unfriendly territory—I shied away from discussions that could risk enemy fire. Yet on more than one instance, I was assaulted by barbed comments aimed at my known or perceived political proclivities—identified as I was by my VW Eurovan and Joni Mitchell CDs—comments mostly related to welfare and federal handouts and out-of-control government intrusion, as though I were responsible for all the Fox-generated hype ramping up their ire and cross-waving contempt. But I was not the only one in the line of fire. Throughout the country, cordiality and respect and an acceptance of differences had given way to blame and resentment and anger on an unprecedented scale.

But I made it back to the West Coast’s bluish fringes only mildly scathed and ready to enter the final semester of my MFA program, at which time I requested and received Mike Magnuson as my advisor. Not only is Mike a gifted writer, but also a lover of Oregon’s fine pinot noir, which he was happy to share on more than one occasion, a big point in his favor, and happy too—or so it seemed—to respond to my battalion of questions and concerns and the millions of pages of manuscripts I sent to him throughout the semester. Our exchanges, in fact, had become the foundation of our relationship. I would submit a story. He would tear it apart. I would call him for clarification. He would smooth my ruffled feathers. We would then repeat the process. So efficiently did this pattern continue that we might still be at it had I not graduated and we had not gone are separate ways.

Recently, I discovered a Salon article written by Mike (“Game over, conservative friend”), published right after the presidential election. Actually, it’s not quite an article, but an open letter to “Rick,” a childhood pal from their days in Menomonee, Wisconsin.

In the letter, Mike illustrates how he and Rick played out their own microcosm of a divided nation, revealed through a series of Facebook exchanges—almost daily in the months leading up to the election—in which they cajoled and taunted and annoyed and embarrassed each other before a world of conflicting forces. “We never stopped,” Mike writes. “We never surrendered.”

When Mike and Rick were boys, they had fished the Menomonee River together, played drums in the middle school band together, and together shared a love of the Milwaukee Brewers and Green Bay Packers and Bic Banana Markers. Yet after 20 months of Facebook bickering, fueled by a bitter and divisive election season, Mike admits that their friendship might now go the way of the marker, a fact in which neither should feel pride: “People avert their eyes when we strike up the band, Rick. We are, in everybody’s estimation, a disgrace.”

Their disagreement, according to Mike, lies in a notion that neither seems willing to abandon: “the idea that you have to become me, and I have to become you.” Even if Mike were to promise to respect Rick’s view and bury all enmity, he knows he would never follow through—that few in fact would be able to do so:

How many hundreds of thousands of people in this country have come to this same place? How many people like us have had all positive connections between them destroyed? Close friends from childhood or from college or from the workplace or immediate family or distant relatives or husbands and wives and neighbors and strangers—all of us fellow citizens of the same two-headed empire where both heads want to chop off the other.

We could, of course, point fingers at those who control the media and politicians as the source of our separation and unwillingness to bend, but taking on the role of victim is as much a symptom as the gap that separates us. No amount of blame can excuse what we have allowed to happen. No amount of finger-pointing can remove the stains. And as Mike has discovered, the consequences run as deep as the Tsangpo Canyon:

We have become estranged from each other in legions. We dismiss people as freely as we pitch our Taco Bell bags into the trash. We rage and hate and loathe and fester and pick fun and bully and take constant offense and always refuse to concede that, just possibly, the other side may have a meritorious point. Can you see a way to fix this? Because I sure as hell can’t. Actually, I will almost certainly disagree with whatever you propose to fix this. So I take the question back. I want to take everything back, almost all the way to the beginning.

But how do we take everything back? How do we take back the accusations, the name-calling, the assumptions, the misinformation, the generalizations, the discriminations, the compassionless, mean-spirited, selfish diatribes that move us further apart with each aftershock?

Perhaps the answer lies in Initiative 502. Perhaps this measure can serve as an example of reasoned debate and sensible execution. Perhaps we can start having rational discussions on other topics as well. Perhaps one head doesn’t have to chop off the other.

Then again, the passage of Initiative 502 might have nothing to do with sense, only sensibility—a belief that if enough of us get stoned and stay that way, these hostile and hateful and fruitless encounters will no longer be worth the bother, that we can at last have conversations both friendly and embracing, even if not the most coherent. And if that turns out the case, then the rest of the country might want to jump on our wagon, while the band’s still playing and there’s still plenty of good fellowship to be had.

Despite their discouragement, some have been willing to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get on with business, without resorting to name calling, making threats, or throwing tantrums.

Others have not been so gracious.

Stephen Baldwin is one of those. In response to the election news, he tweeted that his hope is now in Jesus, not Obama. “God’s wrath is upon the US,” he broadcasted to the world.

Victoria Jackson of “Saturday Night Live” fame has also proven to be one of the less gracious. She announced—again, via Twitter—that Democrats voted God out and replaced “Him” with Romans 1, which she equates with environmentalism and homosexuality. Later she compared Obama to Hitler. “I can’t stop crying,” she tweeted. “America dead.”

Such rantings are difficult to outdo, but some might argue that Donald Trump readily exceeds both Baldwin and Jackson with his tweets:

This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!

Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble…like never before.

Our nation is a once great nation divided!

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.

Beijing had a bigger celebration than Chicago last night. The Chinese are happier with the election than we are.

Russian leaders are publicly celebrating Obama’s reelection. They can’t wait to see how flexible Obama will be now.

But Ted Turner has nothing on Ted Nugent, the aging rocker whose hateful rhetoric takes tweeting to a whole new level:

Dear God in heaven America vote Mitt Romney Paul Ryan Republican and save America

Vote for Obama & vote for US Constitution hating SCOTUS crazies

Pimps whores & welfare brats & their soulless supporters hav a president to destroy America

So Obama still demands the hardest workers provide for the nonwotkers. Shared opportunitiesmy ass

What subhuman varmint believes others must pay for their obesity booze cellphones birthcontrol abortions & lives

Goodluk America u just voted for economic & spiritual suicide. Soulless fools

According to floatingsheep.org, Twitter saw a spike in racially motivated hate speech following the election. After taking a sample of messages, the organization calculated each state’s share of election hate tweets in relation to its total number of tweets. The southeastern US had a much higher rate than the national average, with Mississippi and Alabama at the top of the charts, followed closely by Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

Yet Twitter is not the only social network medium where a disgruntled electorate found its voice. A Texas GOP official, in a Facebook posting, left no uncertainty about his reactions to the election:

We must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity. But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity.

A teacher in Columbus, Ohio had a slightly different take on the election, as reflected on her Facebook page:

Congrats to those dependent on government, homosexuals, potheads, JAY-Z fans, non Christians, non taxpayers, illegals, communists, Muslims, planned murder clinics, enemies of America, Satan You WON!

In Turlock, California, a 22-year-old woman posted racially charged remarks on her Facebook page and suggested that perhaps Obama “will get assassinated this term.”

At Hampden-Sydney College, a small all-male school in Virginia, 40 students stood outside the Minority Student Union and shouted racial slurs, threw bottles, and set off fireworks.

At the University of Mississippi in Oxford, 400 gathered to protest the election results, using the opportunity to deliver their own assortment of anti-Obama racial slurs.

It would seem, based on such evidence, that the divisions in this country have grown into an unbridgeable chasm. We castigate opposing views. We vilify those who disagree. We condemn anyone whose beliefs or perspectives or lifestyles contradict our own.

At least that’s how some people behave. Others believe that we have a choice, that we don’t have to respond out of fear, ignorance, intolerance, and hate.

This past September, NPR interviewed Brian McLaren, an influential evangelical minister and author of over 20 books. McLaren plays a principal role in the Emerging Church, a Christian movement that rejects traditional religious institutions in favor of a more open and accepting community that embraces diversity.

In discussing the causes of tension among religions, McLaren says that, contrary to popular belief, it’s not the differences between them that’s the problem:

I’ve become more and more convinced that the real issue is something we all have in common, and that is we build a strong identity among us by emphasizing hostility toward [other religions]. We love to recount the stories of how they persecuted us. We love to talk about the threat they pose to us. And in all these ways, we build this oppositional identity.

McLaren came to believe that his call to love God and love his neighbor was in conflict with what he’d been taught the Bible required him to say and do. And he sees the same attitude in young Christians who have dropped out of the church because they didn’t want to be part of a community that put them in a conflicting relationship with their friends and neighbors. “Ironically, their Christian call to love their neighbors as themselves was in conflict with their experience of living as a Christian and experiencing something other than love with their neighbors.”

McLaren believes that if Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, and the Buddha were to bump into each other on the road, they would go have a cup of tea or something and would treat each other far differently and far better than many of their followers. Church goers routinely claim privy to the ultimate truth while challenging the legitimacy of belief systems other than their own. Yet McLaren feels hopeful about the future:

I think we might be entering into an era where we stop arguing with each other about legitimacy. I think this could be a very exciting new era if we look around and say, thank God for the diversity. This diversification doesn’t have to mean division.

But notions of embracing diversity are nothing new. In 1993, Nancy Coker spoke before the Parliament of the World’s Religions, presenting the theosophical view on diversity. According to Coker: “Theosophy teaches that everything and everyone is holy and divine.”

Coker recounts the story of the student who finds his guru sound asleep with his bare feet propped up on a holy shrine. When the guru wakes up and discovers the student’s consternation, the guru says, “Well, then, put my feet some place that is not holy.”

According to theosophical thinking, an essential unity permeates everything that is, and this unity is fundamental in nature. We are interdependent and related. We are one in essence.

On the physical plane, however, this oneness expresses itself in infinite diversity. And it’s this diversity that challenges our ability to come together. As Coker points out, we have unique histories and visions, but we see these differences as conflicts to be avoided. Yet she believes that, within this spectrum of diversity, we can still foster true community:

Not by denying our differences, hiding behind them, ignoring them, nor respecting them from afar. Perhaps we can start by understanding them and by redefining community as the inner connections, rather than the outer ones, the community of the heart where unity is more truly perceived and no one is excluded. This is where we can begin to answer the age-old question about the responsibility we have towards our community: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”—with the response, “my brother and I are one.”

In the Buddhist tradition, there’s a story about two monks who come to a river and find a woman needing to cross to the other side, but the river is too high for her to make it on her own. She asks the younger monk for help, but he refuses because his sacred vows prevent him from touching a woman. The older monk, however, agrees to carry her across the water. So she climbs on his back, they forge the river, and he deposits her on the other side.

As you might expect, the younger monk is pretty miffed at the older one’s behavior. By the time they arrive at the monastery, the younger one can keep quiet no longer and demands to know how the other monk could have betrayed his vows. The older one says, “Oh, that. She needed help. I carried her. I dropped her off on the other side. You did nothing, yet you continue to carry her on your back.”

There are a number of different versions of this story told within the Buddhist community. And there are a couple of Christian versions as well. In fact, I’ve even seen Taoist and Jewish ones. Same story, same message, different faiths.

The greatest challenge we face right now is not the economy or the environment or health care or any number of other issues. The greatest challenge is the divide that separates us from our neighbors and our communities—and that ultimately separates us from ourselves. Until we come together, little else can be discussed or reasoned, let alone resolved.

Differences are an innate part of life. Diversity is the inherent state of nature. In our refusal to accept them, we carry a burden that grows heavier every day. Yet we are born from the same earth. We dissolve into the same dust. We breathe the same essence. Can it possibly be any other way?

More often than not, when it’s time to do laundry, we have to first clean up the messes left by the other tenants—the scattered and smeared dirt, the spilled detergents and stain removers, the telltale lint and chemically treated paper sheets used to soften (and chemically treat) their drying clothes. For me, cleaning up after my neighbors has become such a part of my routine that I often bring an extra towel or rag along when I do my laundry, just to be prepared for what I’ll find.

But laundry facilities occupied our conversation for only a short time, and we quickly turned from dirty clothes to dirty public places in general. (After all, how much is there to say about a laundry room?) We have both observed that when it comes to shared spaces—those for which we can’t claim direct ownership—we seem to have a cultural mindset that precludes taking responsibility for anything we don’t consider part of our personal sphere, even if we’re paying hefty rents or taxes or fees to support them.

There are, of course, those who have little regard for anything around them—personal or otherwise—but I believe they’re in the minority. For most of us, our sense of responsibility falls squarely on the personal side, with little investment in what lies outside. This attitude doesn’t necessarily result in willful destruction, but certainly willful disregard. So what it we leave our newspapers sitting on the bus? So what if we don’t pick up the dog shit our pets drop in the park? So what if we leave our dirty cups in coffee shops for someone else to clean up?

My friend and I wondered whether this indifference to what is not our own is in part due to a diminished sense of community, that we take no pride in what is shared because we feel little sense of belonging to or participating in the environments that surround us. Every day, it seems, we’re encouraged to separate ourselves from others through our rampant consumerism and materialism and technological obsessions, each of which demand that we prioritize our personal gratification over the concerns of those around us. We might express our uneasiness about the environment and poverty and health care and civil rights, but if taking action means sacrificing our sense of personal space and possession—and the perceived comforts and conveniences they bring—chances are we’ll do little more than give lip service to our various causes.

That might seem quite a leap—from dirty laundry rooms to materialism to lack of community—and I wouldn’t rule out caffeine as our primary agitator. Still, I can’t help thinking that we’re steadily drifting away from any sense of community toward something more akin to separation. We stare at laptops and smartphones in isolation. We wear headsets and earphones in isolation. We drive cars and listen to radios in isolation. We watch TV and stream Netflix in isolation. We create cocoons that protect and segregate and remove us from having to interact with our neighbors or our families or our friends.

In the 1990s, the Dalai Lama wrote an essay called “The Global Community” in which he claims that the world’s populations are moving toward becoming a single people, a consequence of political and military alliances, industry and international trade, and worldwide communication.

Barriers that once existed as a result of distance, language, and race are quickly dissolving, and we’re being “drawn together by the grave problems we face: overpopulation, dwindling natural resources, and an environmental crisis that threatens our air, water, and trees, along with the vast number of beautiful life forms that are the foundation of existence on this small planet we share.”

Yet dissolving barriers do not equate to a global community. We have to work to make that happen. But the Dalai Lama isn’t advocating that we create movements or establish organizations to promote community-centric ideologies. He sees building community to be the responsibility of each individual:

In our present circumstances, none of us can afford to assume that somebody else will solve our problems; each of us must take his or her own share of universal responsibility…The real test of compassion is not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in daily life.

Global forces might be drawing us together, but it takes individual commitment to create a community to reign in those forces.

Martin Luther King also liked to think in terms of community. As Grace Lee Boggs wrote in her 2004 article “The beloved community of Martin Luther King,” King believed that the black revolution was more than just a struggle for civil rights. “It is exposing evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society.”

King called for a shift from a “thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” He viewed technology as a dictatorship that diminishes people because it eliminates the sense of participation. Growing material powers can result in greater peril if there is no proportionate growth of the soul:

When machines and computers, profit motive and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

King wanted to see individuals at the grassroots and community levels help to create new values, truths, relationships, and infrastructure. According to Boggs, he called for a “radical revolution in values and a new social system that goes beyond both capitalism, which he said is ‘too I-centered, too individualistic,’ and communism, which is ‘too collective, too statist.’”

Part of what influenced King’s conclusions was the Vietnam War. Before he was assassinated, he came out against the United State’s involvement in the conflict and advocated the concept of global citizenship. “Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best of their individual societies.”

But King was writing in the ’60s. Boggs wrote her article 35 years later, during the height of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Yet she believed we could still learn much from King and called on his revolutionary spirit to counter the Bush administration’s exploitation of “popular fears to carry out its agenda of military buildup, cutbacks in social programs, and suppression of dissent.” Boggs challenges us to become the change we want to see in the world:

By internalizing and sharing [King’s] concept of love as the readiness to go to any length to restore community, we can help more Americans recognize that the best way to insure our peace and security is not by warring against the ‘axis of evil’ but through a revolution of our own values and practice. That revolution must include a concept of global citizenship in which the life of an Afghan, Iraqi, North Korean, or Palestinian is as precious as an American’s.

That’s a lot to ask for in this era of iPads and Androids and HDTV. That would be a lot to ask for even if iPhone 5 hadn’t made its sensational debut. In fact, I’d be happy if I could just get my neighbors to clean up the laundry room after they’ve finished washing their piles of dirty clothes.

You’ve known since the beginning how you’re going to vote, at least for partisan offices. You plan to follow party lines because you believe you’ve no other choice. The other party, you’re convinced, represents everything foul and unholy. They revel in contradiction. They mislead at every chance. They lie to anyone who’ll listen.

You review the list of candidates that you’re supporting. The truth is, you feel little excitement about any of them. In many cases, they’re only slightly less corrupt, slightly less dishonest, slightly less disinterested in their constituents than the opponents you want to oust.

You wish there were alternatives—viable candidates who could win elections but who’ve not been bought and sold by oil companies and insurance companies and the big pharmaceuticals. But such individuals rarely come to the forefront, let alone win political races, so you settle for the lesser of evils, at least that’s how you’ve got it figured. Few politicians, you believe, leave the arena without blood on their fingers.

Still, you wish it were not so. Despite the pompous punditry and the banal bickering, part of you carries hope for a different future, an unreasonable yearning that one day credible and ethical individuals will emerge. But in times such as these, you can no longer believe in fairytales. You can only accept the hard truths that stare back at you from this plain and lifeless ballot.

You mark the boxes next to your candidates’ names, careful not to go outside the lines, not to make errors that could cancel your vote. No hanging chads, you tell yourself, not even a metaphorical abstraction.

You cast your vote on all the partisan races and then move onto the local, nonpartisan ones. For many of them, you have no idea how to vote, so you use as your guide the pamphlet you received in the mail around the same time you received your ballot. You use it too to study the resolutions and propositions passed down from the state and local governments and garnered by a self-interested population. Although you’ve personally vetted these issues in the weeks leading up to the election, the pamphlet helps to solidify your decisions.

You complete the ballot and review your entries, as though checking the answers on a quiz for which you weren’t prepared. You ensure that for each congressional seat you’ve marked the correct candidate. For the presidential election as well, along with any other races you deem important.

You consider one last time the possibility of voting for someone you believe in, someone who shares your concerns, whose integrity you trust. But you know what happens when voters splinter away from party lines and follow their ideals. You’ve seen elections lost. You’ve seen futures tumble. It’s too much to risk, you think, despite your reservations, despite your beliefs and desire to follow your heart.

You let out an audible sigh, long and deep. You didn’t mean to do this. In fact, you didn’t realize you were making a sound until your breath was all but expired. You fold the ballot and insert it into the envelope and seal it. The glue tastes bitter, makes you feel slightly nauseous. Then you insert that envelope into the larger one and seal that as well. You sign the back and place a stamp on the front, in the position designated for postage.

Tomorrow, on your way to work, you’ll drop the ballot into the mail. You’ll know at least you’ve performed your civic duty. You’ll be confident that you’ve done everything in your power to ensure the most favorable outcome, given the limited options available. You’ll even believe you’ve done what’s best for the country, though best is hardly what you’d call the people you voted for.

You’ll go to work and you’ll put in more hours than what you’ll be paid for and take on more responsibilities than what you agreed to. You’ll wish you had the cash you needed to meet the higher utility bills and grocery bills and medical bills. You’ll hope that nothing will happen to prevent you from working because you know you and your family will never make it without this job. So you’ll take on more hours and carry more responsibilities. Yet even though you do, you’re not sure they’ll be enough to survive. You’re not even sure what it means anymore to survive.

That’s when it happened. A massive SUV raced into the intersection and started to turn left, directly toward where I was walking. My first thought was that the driver must certainly see me. Then I thought that the driver certainly does not see me. And finally I thought only of the looming chrome grill and the bumper’s deadly gray glare.

I sprinted forward just in time, letting loose a string of expletives that rushed forth like, well, like someone running from of an oncoming car.

The driver saw me just as I had leapt out of the way. She hit the brakes and stared at me with a look of horror that directly reflected what I felt inside. She did not move or speak, though clearly, judging by her troubled gaze, there was something she wanted to say.

I walked away.

That was the third time in the past month I was almost run down. I’m not talking about the usual close encounters you get when you mix pedestrians and cars. I’m talking about a second or two having made the difference between being here to write this post or being splattered in the street along with the rest of the road kill. And in all three cases, I was in a designated crosswalk and had the right-of-way. In all three cases, the drivers sat with looks of terror on their faces, once they realized they had almost nailed me. In all three cases, I escaped only because I happened to be paying more attention than the people in their cars.

It would be nice to come up with a convenient explanation for this string of mishaps, but none has been forthcoming. In only one case was the driver talking on a cell phone. Not the woman yesterday, but the woman who almost splattered me in Beaverton. And the other driver, a young guy pulling out of a nearby Honda dealer, didn’t look in my direction until I pounded on his car. The woman yesterday looked. She just never saw me.

Having this happen a third time in such close proximity to the other two incidents has me wondering what might be going on. One possibility, of course, is that the three near misses were merely coincidental, several rolls of the dice that resulted in unrelated events, if you believe in that sort of possibility.

Another explanation is that someone was—and perhaps still is—out to get me. If not a specific person, then perhaps a greater power. The universe is a trickster, after all, and as most of us realize, no one gets out of here alive.

There is yet a third possibility. We’re all a lot more distracted than ever before. Our ability to concentrate has been undermined by cultural forces that are curtailing our capacity to perform all but the most rudimentary of tasks with a clear head. Satellite TV and social networking and mobile phones and the Internet have pointed our brains into so many directions that we’ve become incapable of looking in any one of them for any length of time.

I like this theory. It puts everything into a neat little perspective. And it makes me feel less paranoid than the belief that a vindictive person—or worse, a vindictive god—is trying to run me down.

Yet pinning our evolutionary fates on technology is no easy task, although people have been trying to do so since Gutenberg started peddling his Bibles. In recent years, for instance, we’ve seen a flurry of publications suggesting that the Internet is changing the way we read and think.

Take Nicholas Carr. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he makes the case that, because of the Internet, many people no longer read at the same depth they once did. They no longer have the capacity to do so, he believes, which causes him no small level of concern. “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our minds.”

Carr even suggests that deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” he writes, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

But such arguments, whether or not true, don’t necessarily explain why people are trying to run me down. In fact, one could posit that the Internet—and the multitude of devices it now supports—keeps our focus shifting at such rapid speeds that we’re becoming more equipped to react quickly to unforeseen events. Our brains may be reverting to a pre-literary age, a time when we had to maintain constant vigilance for encroaching threats, whether real or otherwise. The Internet might represent an evolutionary step backwards that is perhaps making us more aware of our surroundings, rather than less.

I realize I’m reaching here, especially in light of recent studies that challenge our assumptions about multi-tasking, which the Internet has helped to define, if not outright heralded. And the fact is, I can’t say with any certainty whether this theory or any others might even be close to the truth. I best leave such matters to those with far more expertise than what I have.

What I wonder, however, is whether we should also be looking at the social factors that have led us to embrace the Internet and electronic gadgetry with such vehemence. You walk into a coffee shop and most of the patrons are staring at laptops or tablets or smartphones. You walk down the street, past parents with strollers and people with dogs and pedestrians rushing hither and yon, and you find a hefty percentage calling or texting or plugging into their devices.

When the iPhone 5 went on sale the other day, four of the top 10 most viewed stories on The New York Times website were related to the new device. It’s as though we can’t embrace this electronic wizardry fast enough. Perhaps it’s letting us do what we’ve wanted to do all along—protect ourselves within invisible walls that grow higher and wider and more substantial with each new product that comes on the market.

Even so, whether my recent string of near misses has anything to do with a cultural trend, I cannot say. But we do seem less capable of focusing on our day-to-day tasks more than ever before. I buy groceries from stores with clerks who never acknowledge my presence. They scan my food absently as they talk to other employees or stare into space. I step out of the way of people rushing down sidewalks, unaware I’m there as they send and receive their daily allotment of texts. I watch bicyclists ride past me while talking on their cell phones, ignoring stop signs and traffic and people crossing the streets. I rush out of the way of moving vehicles because the drivers never notice I’m walking in the places they’re about to occupy.

Something is going on. We seem so distracted by everything that’s not in front of us that we’re no longer capable of responding to what’s actually there. We live in every place but this one. We experience every moment but this one.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book Touching Peace, says that our true home is in this moment. “To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.”

I like that. In fact, as soon as I get a chance, I plan to google “living in the moment,” right after I check my email and send a few texts and catch up on Facebook and return several phone calls. I only hope that Google doesn’t lead me on a wild google chase and I end up visiting a bunch of home decorating sites and insurance company sites and car dealer sites. But if I do come up with anything useful about living in the moment, I’ll be sure to send out a tweet or two so the rest of you can get a glimpse of all that wisdom.

The perfect arrangement it would seem, particularly since I work at home. And here’s another important advantage: I’ve taken another step toward simplifying my life.

I’ve been doing that a lot lately—getting rid of what I don’t need, buying only what I do need, and generally making decisions based on whether I’m simplifying or intensifying.

At least that’s how the theory goes.

In the past, I’ve often gone through periods of such purging in order to free myself of possessions because of the freedom it affords—whether perceived or otherwise. It would be nice to attach some altruistic or spiritualistic sentiment to my actions, but the fact is, I’m happier when I remove the clutter. If in the process I end up consuming less and using fewer resources and clearing the path to enlightenment, so much the better.

I’m not suggesting that I live a Spartan lifestyle. I enjoy good food and good wine and a good bed and indoor plumbing. Having lived without many of these at one time or another, I can attest fully to how nice they are to have. To this day, the sound of a flushing toilet is music to my ears.

I’ve grown accustomed to other luxuries as well. I live in an apartment with more than one room. I have LED nightlights in many of those rooms. I even have an air purifier that keeps my rooms smelling as sweet as a daisy freshener.

So, yeah, I’m still enough of an entitled American to be using more than my fair share of the planet’s resources. I might be below the national average (or I might not be), but I remain enough of a participant that there’s no way I can cast stones without shattering my own glass house. Even my breathing releases CO2.

Yet no matter where I do sit on the scale, I can’t help but be aware that there are a lot of us on there and that we’ve just about tipped the damn thing over. Clearly, we can’t continue to live the lifestyles we’ve been living without even more serious consequences than we’re already seeing, not only to the global environment, but also to the people and places and flora and fauna directly affected by our gas-guzzling, climate-controlling, resource-intensive, electronically-engineered, consumptive lifestyles.

According to an article in the Guardian, China now emits more carbon dioxide than the US and Canada combined. Yet on a per capita basis, Americans continue to out-emit the Chinese by four-to-one. Plus, one of the reasons the Chinese are belching out so much CO2 is to produce products that keep us little American consumers happy.

Even if we don’t factor in our second-hand smoke, the US continues to hold the number one slot for per capita emissions among the world’s big economies. In 2009, for example, each individual in the US pumped out an average of 17.67 metric tons, compared to 1.72 metric tons in Indonesia, 1.38 in India, and 1.13 in Africa.

It’s not surprising that we’ve been getting away with this, given how much wealthier we are than most of the world’s populations. The Millennium Project—commissioned by the UN Secretary-General and supported by the UN Development Group—estimates that more than one billion people live on less than a dollar a day; that every night, more than 800 million people go to bed hungry; that every 3.6 seconds, another person dies of starvation.

Even here in the US, the wealthiest country in the world, the outlook continues to grow grimmer. According to the US Census Bureau, the real median household income is dropping, the poverty rate is rising, and the number of people without health insurance is greater than ever.

So it’s a pretty bleak picture all around. Sure, a few in this country are fairing better than most, but the rest have either stagnated or lost ground, with the poor in particular taking it in the shorts.

And much of what has been happening on the national and international stages can be directly attributed to our lifestyles—and the politics and belief systems that protect those lifestyles. We might want to ignore our complicity in all this, or even flat out deny it, but few of us can absolve ourselves from some level of participation.

Yet at this point, it’s no longer a question of the parts we’re playing, but rather what we can do to turn these parts around—and do so quickly.

At least that is what I ask myself. Or more precisely, I ask what I’d really be willing to sacrifice so that others may have their fair share. Turning off lights and running less water and using biodegradable products and eating organic produce and burning less fuel and recycling trash are certainly better than doing nothing, but they barely scratch the surface when you consider that every year six million children die from malnutrition before they reach the age of five.

When we take into account the disrupted ecosystems and overpopulation and depleted resources and oil-driven wars and attacks on civil liberties and the many other challenges that face us, we are at a critical juncture at every front. We are at a time that calls for radical shifts in the way we think and the way we act. And the longer we delay, the more the planet is destroyed and the more lives that are lost.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. I’m not even sure I’m asking the right questions. Nor do I believe that there are any easy fixes. It has taken centuries of complex maneuvering to get us here, and change of any sort is rarely easy, especially shifts of such magnitude.

Yet to be of any consequence, the changes we embark upon must be on a grand scale, without being sidetracked by trendy lifestyles choices and well-publicized social experiments, without basing our decisions on tweeted accolades and Facebook-friendly fantasies. We’re talking change that transcends our needs for entertainment and instant gratification, change that takes into account those living now and those yet to be born, change that values the ecosystems that support and sustain us, change that is moral and just and responsible, change that recognizes and seeks to preserve the sanctity of all life.

During World War II, people in the US made a great number of sacrifices to support the efforts on the Pacific and European fronts. They recycled, they rationed, they came together as communities for what they perceived as the greater good. Not all people participated. Not all people agreed with the war effort. And not all people were honest in their dealings. Even so, many did participate, and their participation made a difference in that effort because they believed in something larger than themselves.

Perhaps if we could come together in that way now, but this time to fight a different type of tyranny—the tyranny of poverty and hunger and disease and environmental devastation. But it would call for sacrifice. It would call for commitment and courage. Above all, it would call for compassion and a belief that there is more to life than our own self-interests.

But it starts with individuals willing to commit to making significant changes in their own lives, people willing to sacrifice on a personal level for the greater good. And that, of course, leads me back to myself and to my original question. What, exactly, am I really willing to give up so that others might have lives worth living—or be able to live their lives at all?

Such exchanges, I believe, keep us from taking ourselves too seriously and, by extension, the world around us. They help us maintain an even keel, perhaps keep us sane. They might even ease some of the pangs that come from an aging body.

After discussing the bandages and postcard, we updated each other on what’s been going on in our lives—the usual events that mark time’s immutable passage. I mentioned that I had sold my Volkswagen Eurovan, a vehicle I associate with many fond memories. But the time had been right to let it go. My friend realized this as well, yet he understood too that selling it had not been an easy decision. “True,” I replied, “but what is aging, if not letting go our dreams?”

I had made this comment so off-handedly that for a moment neither of us spoke. Then we briefly acknowledged the truth of my remark, though we didn’t pursue the idea much further. Afterwards, however, I thought a great deal about what I had said, specifically in terms of the letting go part. That does seem to be much of what growing older is about.

Aging Makes Buddhists Out of Us All

Yet the idea of letting go is hardly limited to the domain of the aging. Buddhists (and other spiritual types) use the term quite liberally to make their various doctrinal points. And I think there is much to say for not holding on as fiercely as we do. We’re like swimmers clutching big rocks as they sink to the ocean’s bottom, afraid to let ourselves float with the current. Afraid to let ourselves float anywhere at all.

Before I go further, however, let me point out that I’m neither an expert in Buddhism, nor do I consider myself to be a Buddhist. I am, at best, an amateur explorer intrigued by many of the tenants inherent in Buddhism. I take my lead from Alan Watts. When giving a talk about Zen Buddhism, he announced that he wasn’t professing to be a Buddhist, nor was he advocating Buddhism or any Eastern philosophy. He wasn’t selling anything, he said. He was simply an entertainer.

I can speak with more authority about aging than I can Buddhism. The golden years have already begun to recruit me. I believe the process began when I received my first unsolicited communication from the AARP. And whether it’s a direction I would have chosen on my own is of little consequence. When it comes to growing older, it is indeed a matter of sink or swim.

But let’s return to Buddhism for a moment. Thich Nhat Hahn, in his book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, describes the four immeasurable minds: love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. The Sanskrit word for equanimity is upeksha. It can also mean nonattachment, nondiscrimination, even-mindedness, or letting go. The word comes from the roots upa, which means over, and iksh, which means to look. According to Thich Nhat Hahn, “You climb the mountain to be able to look over the whole situation, not bound by one side or the other.”

Upeksha calls for us to see everyone as equal, without attachment or clinging. “We shed all discrimination and prejudice and remove all boundaries between ourselves and others.” We are, in a sense, letting go of the barriers we’ve spent a lifetime putting into place.

Pema Chödrön provides a different take on letting go. In her essay “The Answer to Anger & Aggression Is Patience,” she suggests that patience is the antidote to aggression. She sees aggression as being synonymous with pain, and patience as a way to stop our suffering from that pain.

Behind all our pain, Pema Chödrön says, “there is always something we are attached to. There is always something we’re holding on to.” But we have a choice whether to hold on or to let go, and that’s where patience comes into play. “Even with small things,” she says, “you may—perhaps just intellectually—begin to see that letting go can bring a sense of enormous relief, relaxation and connection with the softness and tenderness of the genuine heart. True joy comes from that.”

I’ve heard other Buddhist teachers speak of letting go as well, always within different contexts, but somehow all saying the same thing. For example, last year sometime, I listened to a podcast on Buddhist meditation. During his talk, the speaker quoted a revered Buddhist monk as saying that meditation can be synthesized down to two words: “letting go.”

So you can see why, when I think of aging, I can’t help but think of Buddhist teachings. Yet aging, I believe, is its own teacher. Every day we learn to let go of our youth and vigor, our physical presence and desirability, and often our health and mobility. We learn to let go of what we hoped we would accomplish and what we thought our accomplishments would bring us. We learn to let go of the way we had once defined ourselves and the way we had wanted others to define us. We learn to let go of our aspirations and our dreams and our placement in the world and the importance we once attached to that placement.

Indeed, aging provides us with almost unlimited opportunity to practice letting go—and to practice patience and equanimity. Every time we have to negotiate the rigors of a deteriorating body, every time we’re treated with condescension or indifference or disrespect, every time we’re forced to make choices that curtail where we can go or what we can do, we get to practice patience and equanimity and, of course, letting go.

The older we become, the easier it is to recognize the impermanence of the world that surrounds us. Our histories become testaments to change. Our mortality takes center stage. When we resist nature’s inevitable cycles, we open ourselves up to the pain and suffering that comes from not accepting our lives for what they’ve become, all of which is heaped on to the aging process itself.

Perhaps it is only by letting go of our resistance to aging, by no longer clinging to our expectations of what life was supposed to have brought us, by embracing what we cannot change or avoid, that we can find peace in the process of growing older. Only then can we make the most of the moments we have before us and not regret leaving behind those that have already passed.

Aging lets us grasp life’s impermanent nature in ways we might have been incapable of understanding in our younger years. Aging presents us opportunities to experience a broader perspective that looks beyond the day-to-day obsessions and concerns that plagued our youth, to connect with the world at a level of authenticity that heeds its own natural rhythms, to accept life for what it is and not what we want it to be, to open our minds to a vision that transcends the boundaries between ourselves and everything that surrounds us—so we might yet stand on that mountain and see the world without prejudice or attachment or discrimination.

And if aging can do all that, maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all.

I met Ellen in Seattle. She lived in the same neighborhood where I lived, back when she was a full-time jazz musician. But Ellen isn’t working as a musician anymore. Ellen doesn’t even live in Seattle anymore. She lives in Honduras and runs an organization called Project School Supplies. Ellen founded the organization in 2007 to provide the village schools with educational and building materials.

When Ellen first visited Honduras, she went there to study Spanish. She planned to stay in Copán Ruínas for a week and then return to Seattle. Instead, she stayed two weeks. And when she did return, she sold most of her possessions and gave notice on her apartment. Three months later, she headed back to Honduras to teach English.

But teaching English soon took a backseat to the desperate conditions of the village schools. Classrooms had no books or blackboards or even desks. Students sat on concrete floors beneath roofs that leaked whenever it rained. Lunch programs were unheard of. Restrooms often nonexistent.

Schmuel, the new mascot at Project School Supplies

Out of these conditions, Project School Supplies was born. The original goal, as I mentioned, was to provide schools with much-needed building and educational materials. Since then, the organization has built 10 schools, restored over 50 schools, and supplied more than 80 schools with those materials. They’ve also built a playground, a regional library, and over 20 pilas and banos (bathrooms and wash facilities).

Not enough for you? Project School Supplies has pioneered a high school grant program and provided more than 20 beds to children who’d been sleeping on dirt floors. They even built a house for three orphaned children who had been living on their own. And each year, the organization distributes over 100 Christmas baskets to single parents and orphaned families.

Project School Supplies does whatever they can to remove the barriers that affect the children’s abilities to go to school and stay there. That means installing water tanks and constructing aqueducts and building bridges. It also means taking steps to counter starvation. They’ve set up milk, vitamin, and deworming programs in seven villages and recently launched a sweet potato pilot project.

And Ellen is constantly being called on to help in ways outside the umbrella of Project School Supplies. For example, she once took a mother and her sick baby to a private clinic and paid the mother’s expenses. This after the woman walked three miles down a mountain to a free clinic, only to find it closed.

There’s more. Much much more.

But Ellen—and by extension, Project School Supplies—has proven to be an accommodating force. She has to be. The needs far exceed her capacity to address all of them. Every day, Ellen must face the challenges that surround her. “The malnutrition rate for children in rural areas is a daunting 44%,” she says. “Children are dying from starvation and a lack of clean water. The mortality rate is stunning.”

But Project School Supplies is, if nothing else, a grassroots organization. As grassroots as them come. They source all materials locally, and except for an occasional paid foreman, volunteers from the villages do the work. And that includes the children.

Ellen told me about one village that’s up the side of a mountain, where they’re trying to build a school. Because of weather and road conditions, they can’t get a truck up to the village. “Kids and adults have to walk the two-kilometer muddy climb, carrying one brick at a time.” Then there are the bags of cement—over a thousand of them, each an 80-pound sack. It takes five village children to carry one of those things up the mountain.

But the villagers keep plugging away. And so does Ellen. So, yeah, Schmuel has found a good home. All dogs should be so lucky. The fact that Ellen would take on another responsibility at this point is itself a small miracle. But miracles are what it’s all about. And in a world that condones such abject poverty, it’s good to know that people like Ellen are out there.