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Deep within, we all want to make a difference. Why make a difference? Werner Erhard said:
The moment when you really experience that you have created yourself being whatever way you are, at that same moment you will never have to be that way again.
You choose who you will be. When you profoundly get that you create who you are, then making a difference becomes the authentic expression of that creation. Making a difference is your authentic self-expression.
In Scott Cooper’s “Hostiles” Rosamund Pike as young mother Mrs. Quaid cries in anguish as she digs with her bare hands the graves for her three children murdered by Comanche. Silently compassionate Christian Bale as Captain Joe Blocker watches with his men ready to aid the distraught young widow.
Mrs. Quaid is a woman of God, the woman of faith. Without her faith what does she have? That broke my heart. Terrible things can occur under God’s watch. Writers Cooper and Donald E. Steward don’t stray from the world’s seeming unkindness and unfairness.
Later Mrs. Quaid and Joseph share. She expresses her profound sadness. She says, “Sometimes I envy the finality of death. The certainty. And I have to drive those thoughts away when I wake.”
Recently, my best friend John and I talked. We looked at the certain unkindness present in the world. John said that we often act out of survival, out of fear. Our biggest fear may be death. Watching Rosamund’s Mrs. Quaid in “Hostiles”, perhaps more disheartening than the fear of dying is the fear of living. I know that kind of suffering.
Cheryl says there are “scales of suffering”. Suffering is visceral, real for everyone. Cheryl’s point is that all suffering is valid—it’s not about the varying degrees. One doesn’t compare suffering. We need to have compassion for another’s suffering.
Like Werner, we all want to end suffering. Cheryl looks at discovering your purpose as a possible way of ending suffering. I discovered what gets me through the suffering is having my life make a difference in some small way.
I suffered for a few years as my body seemed to fail me after I got laid off from my job. I stopped practicing Aikido for months. The job that I thought was a cause turned out not to be at least for me. The intentions were not all that they seemed. When purpose dies, it isn’t so much the fear of dying. I suffered from a fear of living without purpose.
My salvation emerged in the people who made a difference for me like Sensei Dan, John, or Mom. Mortality is the hidden blessing and the eternal paradox. In “Last Samurai” Tom Cruise as Algren talks with Ken Watanabe as Katsumoto in his ancestral garden.
Katsumoto: You have nightmares.
Nathan Algren: Every soldier has nightmares.
Katsumoto: Only one who is ashamed of what he has done.
Nathan Algren: You have no idea what I’ve done.
Katsumoto: You have seen many things.
Nathan Algren: I have.
Katsumoto: And you do not fear death, but sometimes you wish for it. Is this not so?
Nathan Algren: Yes.
Katsumoto: I also. It happens to men who have seen what we have seen. But then I come to this place of my ancestors, and I remember. Like these blossoms, we are all dying. To know life in every breath, every cup of tea, every life we take. The way of the warrior….
Nathan Algren: Life in every breath…
Katsumoto: That is Bushido.
Make a difference for others and yourself in every breath. Making a difference can be small, like telling the 16-year-old black belt to remember to “match up and feel your opponent. See him as greater, greater than me. See him as the Sensei years from now, perhaps passing on the similar lesson.” That’s what Sensei Dan had done for me. Mortality is the possibility of making a difference through the generations. In the grander sense, making a difference is the possibility of immortality.
Werner got it. We all want to make a difference. We all want to end suffering. We surrender to compassion getting that we too have suffered in our own ways, in our own scales. Life is both lightness and darkness, and so are we. Making a difference transforms the lightness in darkness. Making a difference is what it is to be human. Making a difference honors life.
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Photo credit: Pixabay
Lisa – Great title! Thank you.