I read the news differently these days.

    One of my daily routines is scanning a dozen or so newspapers.  Although I look for news about China and topics to blog about in general, I cannot help but notice all of the terrible things that happen to people every day in every part of the world.  Like so many other people, I have become hardened to these sorts of stories; they usually do not touch me.  But my own grief at Aidan’s passing has altered my view. 

     As one example, this story from today’s Boston Globe, about a 17-year-old girl and her 10-year-old brother who died in a car crash in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, saddened me.  I think of the parents and their sense of loss and despondency.  There is nothing more painful, I am sure.

    But then I think about Iraq, and all of the terrible deaths happening there.  And Darfur.  And everywhere.  Whether by "natural causes" or man-made catastrophes, every day people die, people who, under somewhat different circumstances, may have lived another day, another year. 

    If we chose to focus only on the death, we would certainly never overcome the depression.  We must chose to think about the lives lived, at least as a means of consolation (although it may be important not to let go of the anger about man-made deaths: perhaps there are steps that can be taken for justice or prevention or atonement). 

    It is in that larger picture that I find some solace.  The much larger picture.  One thing Taoism tells us is that Way, in its infinite inclusion of everything all at once right now, stretches across the divide of being and nonbeing.  From the vantage of that enormity, each of us appears as a mere speck in the timeless cosmic whole.  Aidan’s life of fourteen years may seem short to me.  But from the perspective of Way, however long I live it will not be all that much greater than his.  He is gone from our presence now, but everything before me here will also disappear into the larger Way at some point.  My own being is a fleeting moment in Way.  I stumbled into this consciousness, I have moved through various personal encounters, I have felt the full range of human emotions – more than I could ever have imagined – and I will soon fade out of existence.

    While we must feel pain at the passing of a loved one, we must also feel the joy at our times together.  From the perspective of Way, it is incredible that Aidan and I were ever together at all.   Out of the vast flux of being and nonbeing our lives were one for a time!

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, poverty and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, hot and cold – such are the transformations of this world, the movement of its inevitable nature.  They keep vanishing into one another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we’ll never calibrate what drives them… If you let them move together, at ease and serene, you’ll never lose your joy.  And if you do this without pause, day in and day out, you’ll invest all things with spring.

    – Chuang Tzu