Self Portrait

To be aware of the present is a great gift. Often our mind wonders to the past or future. We are somewhere but not present. One way to be present to the moment is to possess self-awareness.

When my friend Dianne came over today to trade pictures of our pilgrimage of peace she said she had a picture of me. At first I shrugged it off thinking it would be some picture making me look big and fat, which I am. However, when I saw it, it was a person wearing his shawl as a turban and of a person deep in thought or prayer. This is an image of me that I like. It did not show my stomach or much of my gray hair. Seeing oneself can be revealing. Unfortunately one of the pictures of my friend that I took and gave her, but did not publish, was of her with a silly face looking at one of our teachers along the way. It did not represent who she was or would like to be, as her picture of me did.

I will put some of her pictures on the slideshows on the Pilgrimage Peace slide show — at least the candid ones.

Actually the picture is more of the person that I would like to be than who I am on a regular daily basis. With the intensity of the pilgrimage I found myself often sitting alone on the bus or at some stops just trying to collect my thoughts and be quiet.

I cannot last in a shopping mall for more then an hour or so. There is just too much stimuli, sights and sounds, coming at me and I get a headache. On the pilgrimage there was a lot coming at me all the time yet I felt relaxed and calm with no headaches. Both experiences are intense but in quite a different way. I think the difference is that the stuff coming at me at the shopping mall is violent while the stuff coming at me in India was nonviolent.

To use some technical terms it was the difference between chaotic and chaordic, a system that blends chaos and order. Or to put in an earthier way it was the difference between a busy road in India and a busy road in the USA. In India there are cars, trucks motorcycles, bikes, cow-driven wagons, lone cows, camels, three wheeler cabs or rickshaws, and sometimes even elephants, coming at you and passing each other every which way. The beep of the horn seems to be the way persons navigate and bring order to this chaos. In a busy USA road there is order but frustration with long lines of cars waiting, persons impatient with each other or so many in hurry.

In India I was shocked that there were not much more accidents on the roads. In America I am not surprised that there are so many accidents. Self-awareness is high in India.

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