I got back to our monastery Audarya in California a couple of months ago. Costa Rica was quite an adventure, a lot happened in four months. Anyway, this entry is not about that, but about my trip back to the States. Here’s what I wrote at George W. Bush International in Texas during my layover on a beautiful day in September 2008:
Flight CO846 from Costa Rica to San Francisco. I was observing an elderly flight attendant as she was serving out the breakfast plates for the travelers. She tried to smile but it seemed to me like her stomach turned every time she raised the ends of her lips. She seemed disgusted with her job, with people, with those trays and endlessly uttering questions like, “Anything more to drink?”, or “How many persons are in your party?”.
She was serving the passengers, they were enjoying the free drinks and crappy Hollywood comedies. She was biting her lip and trying to forget her aching legs and back by the force of thoughts of the next pay and how she would spend it.
I was thinking of how most of the time we only accept doing service to others because we get some power to enjoy from that. Most work is some form of service. You work for the factory owner; you beep the customers’ groceries at the cashier; you serve your art director’s vision in a design agency; you clean up after people who have more money than you; you drive drunk people around the night-lit cities with a little yellow light on the roof. . . A big part of our waking time is spent working, and we do it all to get money. If you break it down, money really is a form of power. It’s an agreement of society for a concrete symbol of power. You serve(=work) for some time and save money, and then you can have the upper hand for as long as your financial batteries have some juice in them. And then it’s back to the factory again.
Service is seen as something obligatory that we have to do to gain some power to do what we really want to do. Money/power enables us to have leisure, luxury, enjoyment, dominion, freedom.
From this perspective being a servant is the most unwanted thing in the world. It means you’re trapped to fulfilling others’ dreams and desires instead of your own. Being just a servant is the most meaningless, lowest, pitiful position one could imagine.
As these thoughts were bouncing around in my head while secretly observing the flight attendant, I was chuckling to myself. My whole life is about service. I’m a low-life according to a worldly standard! I’m supposed to be miserable and unfulfilled according to how power and happiness are linked together in this world, but I’m anything else but unhappy. What’s wrong with me?
Much of man’s content comes from knowing and acknowledging what he or she is doing. You love your serving position because you’ve embraced it and you know you’re serving. That attitude frees you, expands your wings and you know instantly that you cannot be an enjoyer of your service. That thought liberates you because then you don’t expect anything.
However, many of us don’t acknowledge that simple truth to ourselves and are trapped in a limbo of unsatisfied existence; although we do work every day and serve parents, children, partners, company, state, country, economy .. uh, we still don’t embrace our lowly state of servitude but still believe all that is actually there for us and to satisfy us: our family, company, state … they’re there “for us”.
Even a prisoner is a much more a content man when he stops prancing and screaming behind the bars and finally acknowledges his lowly position. A confession brings deliverance. Ultimately he will find his peace of mind and start to think differently and see the world differently.
Thank you for your nice insights in this blog.
Actually it’s not always easy to keep the right attitude while doing service. We have been in the materialistic conception of life forever and it’s hard to let old habits go.
It’s actually very easy to make yourself believe you’re doing your service purely although it’s motivated by something else than the pure goal we’re after. Baby steps.