Open The Door When "It" Knocks

She settled down comfortably on the plush, beige soft-leather sofa, looked me square in the eye and gifted me a lesson that has been one of the most precious gifts anyone has ever given me.

“Many years ago someone told me a story. I was going through a conflict inside my head and had been holding on to a particular perception as “My Truth”. You know, Manish, the whole My-Truth-Your-Truth new-age post-modernist trope that has brought untold misery on both the holder of such a view as well as to others?”.

I nodded in agreement and we smiled.

“The harder I clung to it, the more miserable I was. Well-meaning friends told me to “let go” of it.

But it was “MY” truth, how I could I let go of it?

After all, in the entire history of “letting go” no one has ever “let go” of something on being told to “let go” of it. So there I was. Dogmatically holding on to “My Truth”. And suffering intensely.

And in any good story there is always a wise sage who appears to blow away some poor mortal’s ignorance. I was, after all, a poor mortal at that point in life, stuck in a hole of my own making. A sage appeared. It does not matter who he was, you don’t know him. Or maybe I just dreamed him up. Anyway…..

He sat me down, looked at me with compassion and understanding and then heard me out for a full thirty minutes, without uttering a word, without interrupting me – he would just nod and smile kindly at times, but not once did he utter a single word. Now, as you know, I am someone who says what she has to say in less than two minutes.”

I chuckled softly at that and riposted “That’s when you are being unduly and insufferably verbose”.

She continued…

“But on that day, I had a lot of nothing to say, and we often say too much when we really have nothing, so it dragged on for 30 minutes. And when I stopped, he put his hand on my head, patted it gently and then he spoke for the next two minutes. And what he said changed my outlook towards that incident in particular and my view on life in general.”

I waited for her, hooked….she has always been a fabulous storyteller.

“He recalled how The Buddha told a story a long time ago. A young widower, who loved his five-year-old son very much, was away on business, and bandits came, burned down his whole village, and took his son away.

When the man returned, he saw the ruins, and panicked. He took the charred corpse of a neighbour’s child to be his own child, and he began to pull his hair and beat his chest, crying uncontrollably.

He organized a cremation ceremony, collected the ashes and put them in a very beautiful velvet bag. Working, sleeping, eating, he always carried the bag of ashes with him.

One day his real son escaped from the robbers and found his way home. He arrived at his father's new cottage at midnight and knocked at the door. You can imagine at that time, the young father was still carrying the bag of ashes and crying.

He asked, "Who is there?" And the child answered, "It's me, Papa. Open the door, it's your son." In his agitated state of mind the father thought that some mischievous boy was making fun of him, and he shouted at the child to go away, and he continued to cry. The boy knocked again and again, but the father refused to let him in. Some time passed, and finally the child left. From that time on, father and son never saw one another.

After telling this story, the Buddha said, "Sometime, somewhere you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it”.”

[Adapted from Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh]