Pride and Papa

There is an old saying that pride goeth before a fall. I think it doesn't have to be before a fall; it can be before a step down. When I first lost my job, I was confident I would have a new one before the unemployment ran out. I was not going to take a job that paid less than what I was making. That did not happen. Here is another way of looking at it. Using "goeth" for goes, pride must leave before one can take a step down. One must get rid of pride before anything can happen. Five years later pride is gone, I am open. I am at a point financially that I became willing to look at jobs that I otherwise would not consider.

Today I took a drug test to prove that I am safe to hand out samples at Costco. (In fact I had to take three because I didn't give them enough the first two times. Not much pride in sitting in a waiting room for hours nursing cups of water.) I am excited to have a job. I hope I am good at it and don't lose my cool with the customers. As soon as they get back the criminal background check, I'll start my training. (Veggie chips? Right over here sir.)

Yesterday I had to take the old man to the dermatologist where they carved away a little more of his skin, this time on his arm. While we were in the car I told him about the job and the criminal check. I joked that those ten years at Leavenworth will look bad on my record. Then I asked him if he ever was in jail and he answered, "Sure." I asked what for and he told me because he had nowhere to stay. He was thirteen or fourteen. How many times? He thought maybe eight times. Then I asked him what happened, where did he go after jail? Did he find a place to stay? He went back to the streets and found a grate. My heart broke for that poor scared child. I never knew that.

He had a mother and a father, grandparents and cousins and no one to take him in. He wasn't a bad child, a thief or a criminal, just unwanted and overlooked. He is deeply flawed, and in his mind he did his best to keep his family together after my mother died. He provided a home and a step mother. He was a madman it is true. It was only when he was 90 and started taking antidepressants that he became a fairly decent person and still he can be awful.

The Dalai Lama talks all the time about compassion. It is only by imagining ourselves in another persons place that we can try to understand and have that compassion. When we were kids we'd ask the old man where he went to college and he would respond, "The school of hard knocks." He has kept most of his early life a secret, let out in dribs and drabs as he ages. It was hard to have any compassion for him before I knew the story of the orphan asylum. We only knew what we could see, and what we saw was violence and anger. Yet there would be glimpses of a loving heart at times. I've had compassion for the man who lost his wife and had three children to raise and compassion for the father who lost his twenty-one year old son. But I had no compassion for the way he was because I didn't understand how he got that way. Having that compassion makes it hard to stay mad at the stuff he says and does.

The medical intuitive Carolyn Myss says that there are entities we meet before birth with whom we make a sacred contract to achieve a goal in this life. I thought for quite a while that maybe the old man was here for me to learn forgiveness, but maybe I am here to help him end his life feeling safe and secure. (Either way, I still want to end it with him this incarnation.)