posted 23 Oct 2015, 19:22 by Akasharaja Bruton
At the moment my focus is very much on our new Buddhist centre, which opens its doors in Shrewsbury for the first time this coming Wednesday. This is a very exciting moment for everyone involved, and we hope it’ll really benefit the whole county – and, who knows, places beyond!
And yet, I can’t help thinking about something one of my fellow Order members said when he came to give a talk a few months ago, that he wished we could just call them Human Being centres rather than Buddhist centres. This might sound a bit flippant, but I think I know what he meant. After all, a Buddhist centre is basically a place where people can come together on the basis of shared values to support and connect with each other. Those values include kindness and friendliness, receptivity and awareness, openness to one another’s aspirations and positive qualities, and a shared wish to further develop those qualities. OK, so there is of course the explicitly Buddhist dimension of enlightenment - ultimate wisdom and compassion - but even that is, in a way, these same qualities writ large, and I hope people won’t need to worry about that too much to feel welcome with us.
My friend’s point was that Buddhism doesn’t hold the monopoly when it comes to a desire to express and experience positive emotion, to give and receive friendship and to connect with other people – to go beyond the narrow confines of our separate and often isolated lives. The desire to connect in a meaningful way, to be able to share ourselves and our inner lives, is a deeply held and universal human wish, and I think you could even go so far as to say that a life lived without this kind of connection isn’t a fully human life at all.
And yet, if you look around you, you surely can’t help but notice how much of our connection with each other is a pseudo, virtual connection. See how many people go about their daily lives glued to their phones, following each other on Facebook and Twitter rather than actually engaging with the flesh-and-blood human beings around them. But the point stands: the desire to connect is there, even if it finds expression in what for previous generations would be a weirdly detached way.
And I don’t think it necessarily takes a lot to get that connection going. A few days ago I was walking out of school, having dropped the boys off, and the mother of one of my older boy’s classmates was walking out alongside me. As we walked our separate paths, I reflected on what was holding me back from talking to her – perhaps a fear of being inappropriate or invading her private space or simply not being interesting enough to merit her attention! So what I did was override those self-referential concerns and start a conversation. And, guess what, she just lit up, and we had a really nice chat, and I came away feeling that it had made a difference to my day and perhaps also to hers. OK, so it wasn’t a deep and meaningful conversation, but the point is that it opened a door to possible future communication and – who knows – perhaps even friendship.
Some people are naturally good at this sort of thing. I know I’m not, but breaking an old habit enabled me to start forming a new one. You might also be one of those somewhat shy individuals, but taking a leap like I did on that occasion can bring surprising rewards. So next time you have an opportunity to connect with someone you don’t know, why not just try to connect? It might just make your day – or, for that matter, theirs!