“What do you want the most?”–Daily Metta

December 25:

“The force of the spirit is ever progressive and endless. Its full expression makes it unconquerable in the world.”

–Gandhi (Harijan, February 10, 1946)

The other day at school, my six year-old friend Ben came over to me with a few questions that were on his mind about Gandhi. For the past year, Ben has had a passionate curiosity about boats and (remember, Ben is six) pirates and the Navy. Still, with his gentle, artistic, creative nature it was not a surprise to me that he had been thinking pretty seriously about Mahatma Gandhi, too, of whom he hears me speak regularly. Not to mention the images that are in our classroom of the Great Soul. I knelt down to talk with him–Ben wanted to know about Gandhi as a person, and almost out of nowhere, he asked me if I knew the names of Gandhi’s mother and father. Putlibhai and Karamchand. And we discussed the way that Gandhi was actually Mohandas Karamachand’s last name.

The next question then bubbled out: how did he get to be so patient? Wow. I thought. This is really serious! And I thought about it for a moment and told him the most basic principle of nonviolence I could think of: more than anything else in all of his heart, Gandhi knew that he wanted to help others, to be of service to the world. He thought all of the time about how to do this and practiced all of the time. Ben grew more than usually thoughtful, perhaps thinking about boat construction that has occupied his mind for such a long time, and he came back, “So he’s basically the opposite of a pirate.”

Experiment in nonviolence:
What do you want more than anything else?