Teach us to be still
I wanted to call you, said my friend when we met by chance at the fruit vendor under a burning sun feeling the asphalt smoking underfoot. We found some shade, and she told me of the teenager she met in the tattered school uniform selling fruit by the traffic lights.
A teacher herself, she recognised the uniform from Malick Secondary School in Morvant and asked him why he wasn’t in school.
He was about 13, still had his mother’s milk on his face, walked with a little limp and gave her a sweet, sad smile when she asked why he wasn’t in school. He told her he was knocked down by a man driving a fancy car. The boy couldn’t stand, so the man promised to pay his medical bills, asked the boy his address and took him home to his parents on Picton Street. But as soon as he dropped the boy, he drove off. Nobody in the family thought to take his licence plate number. The boy was left with searing pain in his knee for months until the school year was over. Now he said he knew he wouldn’t catch up. He was selling mangoes for a lady, he said. His parents didn’t have the money for private lessons or the operation he needed for his knee.
My friend thinks it’s only a matter of time before he is absorbed by gangs in Picton (30, 40 to a gang, some as young as 13, according to a 2012 UNDP study).
It could have been different if the man who knocked him down did the right thing. The boy is bright and gentle and could have made something of himself. But by driving off, that man killed the boy’s belief in the world, deprived him of education, brought him closer to a machine gun, and ruined the lives of generations to come.
My friend, who spends a month’s salary buying school supplies for poor children, who feeds the poor on her birthday, was distraught. She herself had a hard childhood and understood how her sacrifice could scatter seeds of hope just as others had helped her climb out of abuse and poverty. I told her how much I admired her, and she said, “Girl, all of we is one, yes. No one is better than anyone else.”
I was thinking about that encounter when I (not a believer in organised religion) found myself in a Catholic church on Palm Sunday with another friend whose intellect I admire immensely.
I accepted a palm from my friend who clarified the service in whispers, “In Catholicism, there is no such thing as private sin. All sins are collective. If one person sins, it wounds everyone because we are all part of the body of Christ.”
I thought during that service how a man in a posh car pushed his victim over the edge.
That sin was collective. It belongs to us all. We will all cross the road when that schoolboy grows up. We will not give him a job when we see his lowlevel education.
We will report him to the police for stealing mangoes but not buy him books. We will judge and scorn him.
I thought of how all humans KNOW we are fragile as birds, as transient, but unlike birds, frightened of what that means, our death. How most of the time, we cover up the rolling dice of our inevitable deaths with noise, vanity, frenzy, desire, and self-importance.
All religions wisely urge humans to stop the clamour during seasons like these–Lent, Holi and Ramadan.
I was thinking of all this in my yoga class where my teacher said this as we lay prone in a sunny hot room: “One day you will be forgotten. All your dreams, hopes, aspirations and achievements will be gone, wiped out forever by time. But you do have control over your deeds. They will ricochet through the ages. So why not make them good ones? Our collective actions will affect humanity throughout the ages.”
So this spring of quiet burning, fierce flaring blooms Sahara dust, and bowed heads commands us to sit still.
I think of the great poet TS Eliot who wrote, “This is the time between the tension of dying and birth… Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.”