Otherwise Peaceful

Howdy. Hi. Good morning.

The other day I was staying in an inn in a town in New York and in the morning some guys arrived to do maintenance work on the grounds. There was a big lawn, some gardens, etc, and the inn was part of a college campus, so it made sense that they were staying on top of things.

The guys were loud and obnoxious, one of them using the f word frequently. They had to yell over the noise of their equipment in order to be heard by each other, but I guess it didn’t occur to them that their yelling would be heard by everyone staying in the building, too.

I could have gone outside in my jammies and asked them to quiet down, but I didn’t. And it was one of those contactless, ie we can’t find good employees anymore, places, so there was no one actually working at the inn with whom I could have lodged a complaint. I closed my windows and wondered how the maintenance crew could be so oblivious.

The otherwise peaceful gardens of the inn where I was staying.

Our neighbors have a rooster. If you know anything about roosters you know they start making a very loud noise very early in the morning. This one also crows throughout the day. We live up the hill from our neighbors, creating a kind of amphitheater effect whenever their rooster crows or their dogs bark. It’s not ideal.

We are peaceful people and have let this go for a long time, but recently I reached the tipping point. It’s hard to sleep, it’s hard to work with the intermittent blast of a rooster. It’s not like living near a busy road, which I’ve done several times in my life, where the sound of traffic eventually becomes white noise. It’s the car horns of the busy road, always jarring.

The other day we let the neighbors know we would appreciate it if they would do something about the rooster. We learned that they didn’t need the rooster for any particular reason and that they had been thinking about getting rid of it. This was very good news.

We live in what would otherwise be a very peaceful place in Vermont: the far end of a dead-end dirt road. There is no traffic and it’s mostly woods in every direction. It was delightful to think that peace would once again reign in this little slice of heaven.

Only it hasn’t. News update from the wife: the husband wants to keep the rooster.

It’s been a little quieter, but the annoying rooster remains a fixture in our lives.

During these two incidents: the F-Bomb Man, and The Rooster Next Door, I talked and thought a lot about oblivion. I kept wondering why people are so oblivious to how their behavior or their choices are affecting people near them. But I realize now it’s something else.

The neighbor knows his rooster makes a lot of noise. The neighbor knows it bothers us, that it affects the quality of our lives, but clearly the neighbor does not care.

The guys yelling outside an inn early in the morning know they’re working near a place where people are sleeping (were), but they don’t care.

And this, I realized, is a far more serious and sad situation than someone simply being oblivious. That people don’t care. They don’t care about being a good neighbor, they don’t care about being a good employee, they don’t care how anyone near them experiences their choices, they don’t care.

Cut to the person in every airport, on every busy street, in every restaurant, talking loud in a conversation on their cell phone. Doesn’t care.

The person who bumps into you and keeps going. Doesn’t care.

The person for whom you hold the door and they walk right through without saying thank you. Does not care.

When this reality hit me I cried. I cried because when you stop caring about the people around you then you probably don’t care about your larger community, the world beyond that, the wellness of strangers. If you don’t care about the people nearest you do you care about anything past the tip of your nose?

It’s the not caring that leads to the oblivion.

I can’t pass a homeless person on the street without crying. I can’t not feel someone else’s pain. I used to consider it a curse, but I know it to be a blessing. It’s what makes me reach for my wallet and then try to give a homeless person a gift without making them feel ashamed. It’s what gnaws at me, endlessly, to try to make the world a little better before the jig is up.

We live communally, most all of us. Every choice we make, good or bad, affects everyone. We probably don’t think of life that way, but we’re made of energy and that energy bounces off of everything and everyone we interact with. That energy can, in fact, positively affect people really far away from us, if we want it to. That’s what prayer is.

When we stop caring about each other the whole enterprise starts to tank. Whatsoever you do … kind of thing. Communal, community, communion, we are all in this together and we are all responsible for the ties that bind us and when we stop caring the connective tissue starts to fray. And there is no orthopedic surgeon large enough to repair that breakdown, it’s our job, our work, our responsibility. Your choices matter far, far beyond your own little space. And you’re going to see this when you die.

There is a time after death, according to all the channeled works I’ve read and all interactions I’ve had with those in Spirit, when you actually feel how those around you experienced you. You feel the disappointment, the pain, the disbelief, the sorrow you inflicted. Hopefully the love and kindness, too, and lots more of it, but mostly the ways in which you have harmed others. You will feel it. You will know the experience others have had of you in their lives.

Wake up call! Louder, I hope, than any puny rooster, ever.

xomo