The other weekend I was just about to leave the house with my two boys, Sam, aged three, and Charlie, aged 18 months, when Sam started to get agitated and clamour to get in the car. When I asked him what was going on, he told me that he was scared of the noise. The noise in question was some kind of power tool being used in one of the houses in the neighbouring street; it wasn't particularly loud and, I assured him, it wasn't going to hurt him. But he got more and more upset. As we were only going to the playground, all of ten minutes away by buggy, I - not unreasonably I thought - told him not to be so silly: that it was just a power tool and that he would be fine. So I wheeled a protesting Sammy and a completely unfazed little Charlie quickly down the road, away from the offending noise, and he did indeed soon calm down and forget all about it.
But this little episode really made me think. From my point of view, it was unreasonable for Sam to be frightened; yet, in his world where danger lurks in unexpected quarters, fear was a totally natural and reasonable emotion to be feeling. Both of us were right - and both of us were wrong. Just because my experience wasn’t the same as his did not mean that his experience wasn’t real. This underscores one of the primary teachings of the Buddha, which features in the very first verse of the Dhammapada, one of the principal early Buddhist texts:
"Experience is preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind"
Buddhism says that our experience isn't objective: it's a product of our minds. In a very real and important way, we create the world in which we live. Some people may see dangers and threats everywhere; others may walk through life seeing only the sunny side. For some people, football is everything; for others, it's unutterably boring; some may hear a power tool and think nothing of it; others may hear the same thing and be frightened half to death. And this isn't just an interesting idea: it has very real implications for how we relate to, and get on with, other people. The reason we fall out with others is because we think, consciously or otherwise, that they are - or should be - like us, with the same ideas, values and perceptions - and, when they do something we don't like, we judge them accordingly. Or, to take another example, we might not see that our tendency to be spontaneous and in the moment drives people of different temperaments round the bend, because, after all, everyone likes to be spontaneous and in the moment, don’t they? Scale this up to the level of national, cultural or religious conflict and you have a real problem on your hands.
So, what’s my point? Well, in a way, it’s really quite simple. Each of us inhabits a different world, a world that we have constructed out of perceptions, values and ideas of how things are. So what we need to do more is to realise that this is the case, to try to empathise with others, to see things from their point of view - as Harper Lee puts it in "To kill a Mockingbird", to get into another person's skin and walk around in it - before we make judgements. The little episode with Sam was a reminder to me to do this: perhaps there will be an occasion during your day today when you can do the same.