My grandsons were charming little pre-schoolers, full of childish sweetness and off-beat observations. When one of them looked at the baby chick his grandmother was holding, stuck his index finger out and asked, “Poke?”, we erupted with laughter and moved the chick out of reach. It occurred to me later that as a young parent I might have worried that some nascent toddler sadism was emerging in the boy. In my older frame of mind, that kind of concern just seemed ridiculous. (He’s grown up to be a great animal-lover.)

I had trained myself over decades in managerial roles to keep silent tabs on my colleagues’ states of mind and work demeanors. They were, after all, the engines of my company’s performance. In the wake of a personal tragedy I was surprised to feel a new, pleasurable warmth in their companionship. I realized I had, tragically, been missing the fact that my colleagues of two decades were also friends, and I deeply enjoyed being with them. Professionally and practically, I remained responsible for their performance. Their output was, in business terms, an “operating variable.” I realized that I had often been suppressing my affection in order to remain vigilant.

Gratefully, I now realized that my affection didn’t diminish my powers of observation. It sharpened them. I was paying even closer attention to my colleagues, because I cared about them.

They were also very kind and gentle with me when my grief was heavy, which helped me care more about them.

Many sources of joy—sunsets and sunrises; baby animals on our farm; watching a movie; playing music—had a more vivid quality when I lacked the capacity to write them into my old narratives of success. My experiences didn’t need to be woven into the protective tapestry of comfort and safety where I had been placing them. When I was unable to concoct those internal stories of security and certainty the joyful experiences were released from the bondage of strategy and consequence where I had habitually placed them. They were just joyful.

It dawned on me that maintaining certainty—in a world that couldn’t reasonably provide it—took a lot of energy.

We crave certainty, but certainty is not supported by reality. We will die. Everything and everyone we love will pass. We are trying to feel sure and safe in a world that is ultimately unsure and unsafe. So like a pressurized airliner flying 40,000 feet above the earth, our container is under perpetual stress. We imagine feeling completely at ease in an unthreatening place. But outside our imagination the air is thin and cold, the sun is scorchingly bright and gravity pulls toward our planet miles below.

Cattle, sheep, and most other social herbivores often react to a threat by freezing, especially when neither fleeing nor fighting is possible. That’s what happens when you put a cow in a “squeeze chute,” a contraption that helps us doctor sick animals. Essentially, the cow moves down a chute controlled by a lever. When you pull the handle, the walls of the chute close tightly around the animal, forming a v-shape that lifts some of the weight off the animal’s legs. When that happens, surprisingly, cows relax and grow still.

If an adult cow continued to struggle in the squeeze chute, the situation would be unmanageable. It’s her autonomic surrender response that makes it possible to give her the medicine she needs, or even do superficial surgeries.

Once when one of our cows was struggling hopelessly in a patch of quicksand, Carolyn and I managed to rescue her by passing a strap under her body (not the easiest task, as you can probably imagine) and lifting her out with the hydraulic bucket on our tractor. As long as her body was suspended in the strap, she just hung there, placid.

Sheep, horses, and other social herbivores react similarly. To handle a sheep, we first catch its legs and turn it over on its back. When they are firmly held, they freeze.

At first glance, the freeze response may seem counterintuitive. If the individual continued struggling, there would be, of course, some chance of escape. So why do some animals freeze when they are caught? How did that instinct evolve? How could it possibly provide an evolutionary advantage to a creature to freeze in the grips of a predator?

I’ve not found any science to support my theory about this, but it seems logical to me that social animals—especially herbivores that are subject to constant threats from predators —may have developed their freeze response through evolution, to protect their communities. If every animal struggled continuously while being attacked by a predator, many individuals would logically escape, wounded. The herds and flocks would include many maimed individuals, whose reproductive potential would be limited by their injuries. Furthermore, the predators would still need to eat, so it would be necessary to continue further attacks until a kill was made. So, day in and day out, many more of the prey animals would be subject to attack.

When the individual freezes in surrender, he virtually ensures his own death. But in so doing, he temporarily forestalls any further attacks on his herd. In effect, the animals are programmed to sacrifice themselves for the common good.

A lot of people are working hard and spending a LOT of money trying to extend human lifespans and even, perhaps, to solve the problem of human mortality forever.

They are working to create technology that will allow human beings to live forever.

I think that’s a terrible idea.

If, using the imagined technology, we all chose to stop dying tomorrow, we would immediately increase the global rate of human population expansion by about a hundred and seventy thousand people per day. That’s another sixty-two million people a year added to the seventy million or so we’ve been adding already. Meanwhile, we’ve been paving or building on about 2 million acres of nature every year in the United States alone, and we could theoretically increase that to about 3.4 million acres per year. New development in the US now covers an area the size of two Rhode Islands every year. If we suddenly increased human lifespans, we would soon be covering an area the size of Delaware in new development, annually.

While not many of us have the resources, today, to actively pursue technologically empowered immortality, we almost all fantasize about it. Human beings lust for longevity. As long as we’re reasonably healthy and reasonably happy, it’s generally accepted that we would all want to live as long as we can. It just feels natural to us. But we should probably look at the consequences a little more closely.

As a matter of fact, there are some pretty good reasons why human immortality is not a good idea. The destruction of other species might be foremost among them.

Sorry. This may sting a little.

• Extinction wipes out about twenty-seven thousand species per year worldwide, at least hundreds of times the normal extinction rate, pretty much entirely because of human expansion. We’re taking space other creatures need to survive. Almost no one disputes this.

• The number of animal species living in North America has declined by about 30 percent since European colonization began.

• Species are disappearing at a rate not seen on earth for sixty-five million years.

• Total animal populations declined by 60 percent between 1970 and 2012.

Each living thing displaces other living things. We’ve been expanding our population dramatically. On the basis of the energy and space we require, we know we are the most consumptive species per capita on the planet. So, of course we’re responsible for displacing and extinguishing devastating numbers of living beings.

And what about the consequences of our aspirations toward immortality on our own children and grandchildren?

Imagine if we were all percolating along in perfect health at a hundred and fifty years old. Those of us who had great work we enjoyed would, logically, keep doing it. I can’t think of any reason I would ever want to surrender my stimulating job to some hundred-and-thirty-year-old upstart. And, of course, I’d still be living on my beloved farm, in my cherished home. The interesting job, the great view, and the beautiful land, all mine—forever!

Is anyone else starting to feel a little creeped out by this?

What if eternal life becomes a practical alternative, as the longevity-tech gang believes it will? After all, we’ve probably all seen “innovations” we never believed would occur in our lifetimes. What, then, if a single generation lingers on for centuries in its jobs, its houses, and its stable, complacent way of life?

We could, of course, halt population growth simply by having no more children.

But what would human society look like if it weren’t renewed continuously by new generations of energetic, inventive, ambitious young people?

Pretty dreary.

Eventually, an immortal human society would likely be forced to stop reproducing. No more children. No more offensive fashion trends. No more stupid new music. A world full of complacent geezers dedicated to lawn care and televised golf played by bionic athletes. Oldies tunes. All the time.

Ugh.

The techno-longevity folks have responses to these objections. Some of them assert that the new technology will address the problems as they arise. Dozens of billionaires, including Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are investing in space exploration, justified partly by the predicted habitat needs of an expanding human population.

It’s sort of interesting that we call the rest of the universe “space,” since that is precisely what we may need.

Maybe we will, as envisioned by science fiction, extend our habitat to worlds scattered across the cosmos. Personally, I think that’s unlikely, if only because we have no real evidence that others have ever done the same. The mere fact that Earth has apparently not been colonized by a superior extraterrestrial species is pretty good evidence that emigration to habitable planets scattered across light years of cosmos is an unlikely enterprise.

But even if space exploration promised to supply us with thousands of new earths to colonize, should we be satisfied merely to reproduce the human society we know today? The colonization of other planets, as imagined by George Lucas and Gene Rodenberry, is carried out pretty much as European explorers pursued foreign riches in the sixteenth century; which strongly resembled the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century; which bore many resemblances to the Roman conquests a millennium earlier. Hundreds of successive cultures have used economic and technical advantages to conquer, subjugate, assimilate, and assassinate their predecessors on every continent, in every historic period since the end of the Stone Age, and perhaps before.

If we are destined to colonize other planets and galaxies, do we really think that’s how we’ll do it? If that’s how it will be accomplished, do we want that for our human future?

I enjoyed Star Wars and Star Trek. I like to fantasize about human beings traveling through outer space and discovering new worlds. I’d probably enjoy reading a science-fiction story about a self-repairing human being.

But I’m a whole lot more inspired by the idea that we might accomplish something more elemental, before we move on to conquering death and the speed of light.

We already are capable of practicing the low-tech arts of deep compassion and unconditional caring—practices that could justify the space and time we’re already taking up.

Why do we focus so little attention on compassion and so much time, money, and energy on dubious goals of extravagant longevity and technological domination of nature?

Imagine a future in which human beings were expanding across the galaxies, carrying a mission of selfless caring rather than the conquest of space and resources. I feel inspired by a fantasy in which human beings leverage their most unusual and distinctive talents—for collaboration, compassion, and love—to spread “humanity” across the universe. That sounds, to me, like a better reason to live a few years longer and to travel faster than the speed of light.

We want to feel safe.

We want to feel certain of our safety, and the safety of the people we love.

Of course we are not safe, and neither are they. And when that becomes obvious, it can be devastating.

That’s what happened to me.

My son, Noah was 25 years old when he died of addiction in 2013. We, the people who loved him, had endured years of turmoil before that. To love an addict is, in my experience, a uniquely painful thing.

Noah was a delightful little blond boy, affectionate and sweet with people. He grew into a nice young man, a good student, a good musician and an athlete who loved the outdoors. He loved to ski and climb in the mountains.

Always, he was sensitive. As a kid he found transitions very hard. Around people, he was always gentle and kind. When he was stressed or anxious at home, he could become furious. But he grew up, went off to college and seemed to enjoy it. His grades were good. He was excited about his classes. He learned Chinese. It seemed like he was sick a lot, but he managed his own health care. We noticed we paid a lot of doctor bills, but he mostly seemed OK.

After graduation, he moved to Hawaii to live with his girlfriend, a delightful young woman. We thought he was launched.

Then he didn’t get a job for a year. When he did finally land a job at a bank, he failed the drug test. He moved out of his girlfriends’. Eventually he gave us the bad news. He was addicted to opioids and barely able to function.

He came home, got help and got sober. He came to work in my business and did well for a year. Then he started missing meetings. Sometimes he failed to show up. He wrecked a car. He eventually drove his colleagues crazy with his unreliability.

I finally, reluctantly, had to fire him. I think that was a terrible time for both of us. It certainly was for me. He was angry, then remorseful. He went to rehab, but was thrown out for smuggling drugs in. He came home, but was smuggling drugs and booze into our home, and was in and out of psychosis and in and out of jail. He scared us. We told him to leave. Then we asked him to come back. Then we told him to leave again. He was in and out of several rehab programs. He was in and out of friends’ homes. He charmed his way into jobs, then lost them when he didn’t show up.

Toward the end, deep in the throes of his disease, his sadness and remorse were overwhelming. He was living in an apartment we paid for. I told him we felt like we were financing his self-destruction, and we didn’t want to do that any more. He said he understood, and that he was ready to commit himself to a rehab program. We offered to take him. He said a friend wanted to do that. So we waited for the intake bill from the rehab facility. It didn’t come. He didn’t answer his phone. His voicemail was full.

I was going to check in on him, but thought perhaps I shouldn’t. I called the police and asked them to do a welfare check. A few hours later a detective came to our house and told us our son was dead. He drank himself to death, the result of organ failure.

Every parent no doubt has a sense of the pain we feel at the loss of a child. Perhaps any human being can feel empathy.

But then beyond the visceral pain of the loss, we were left to confront a stark and terrifying reality. The worst thing we could imagine had occurred. That implied that all the many things that scare me in this life are also real possibilities. And the narratives I habitually create to reassure myself about the safety of my family; the security of my home; the stability of my country; or even the support of my friends are only reassuring narratives. They had been swept away.

The world, its people and its institutions are, in fact, frail and temporary constructions.

All my illusions of safety and control were shattered.

My confidence in myself was also damaged. If your child suffers from addiction, or any mental illness for that matter, you can never be sure to what degree you might have been responsible. You can’t know if you were, or you were not. Parenting my children had been my deepest responsibility, and I can never know to what degree I had failed my son.

To say my confidence was shaken would be an understatement. For a while it seemed that both the world and my own self-concept were very unreliable.

In that rickety and vulnerable state, I noticed something very unexpected about myself. I felt a new warmth toward other people. My compassion for others surged as my self-esteem ebbed.

And while the pain of grief and loss was terrible, smaller and more trivial concerns and anxieties ceased to trouble me much. Both at work and at home, I focused on routine and even tedious tasks sincerely. They provided some respite from the dark, troubled thoughts that plague deep grief. The car needs tires? I was contented to run it to the mechanics. The monthly financial review for my business provided work I understood and questions I could answer, which felt better than sitting with the grief.

Strangely, the annoyance I always felt when I needed new tires or reviewed the monthly sales figures was gone, at least temporarily. And I wondered why.

Of course part of the explanation was probably that in my emotionally ravaged state I could only process a fraction of my usual feelings.

But it was also true that my routine anxieties—tires and sales figures—were placed in a new context for security and loss—success and failure. I had a new understanding of personal loss, and the devastating scale it could achieve.

For a while, I couldn’t sweat the small stuff.

Eventually I noticed ways in which I was changed. I was more patient. I was more caring. As I gradually emerged from the deepest grief, I thought my focus was actually improved from before the tragedy. I was less inclined to be distracted by petty irritations or pointless resentments I once felt when the tires wore out or the sales numbers dropped. I felt anxiety in meeting those small challenges. Would I choose the right new tires? Would I have an idea for restoring revenues? How can I be sure?

My answers were uncertain, but deep down I believed I should feel some certainty. When I didn’t, anxieties arose.

After our tragedy, I didn’t have capacity for that kind of trivial anxiety. And I had lost all expectation of certainty. I simply got the tires replaced and made a new plan with the sales manager.

At some point it occurred to me that I wanted to preserve and maintain my new open-heartedness. I wanted to keep my trivial frustrations and anxieties in the background. I deeply appreciated the kind of focus and concentration I could engage when I wasn’t distracted by anxiety or frustration.

And it dawned on me that maintaining certainty—in a world that couldn’t reasonably provide it—took a lot of energy.

I had been wounded, deeply, by grief. But I had also been improved by it.

I wanted to maintain those improvements both for my own sake, and as a positive legacy for my son. I wanted to study and practice the openness—to people and experiences—that grief introduced.

And if I learned anything, I wanted to share it.

When Star Wars creator George Lucas needed to name a mystical and universal source of energy, he didn’t refer to it as “The Flow,” “The Spirit,” “The Catalyst,” “The Fusion,” or, more simply, “Gravity.” His popular idea of universal, inexorable energy we can bend to our own purposes is called “The Force.”

The Force is discussed by the characters as a kind of all- encompassing energy, like the “Chi” in Tai Chi; the Roman concept of “numen”; “lungta” in Tibetan Buddhism; or the “spirit” that gives life in many animistic belief systems. In fact, little or no spirituality is depicted in the films. It’s cowboys and Indians in space. Once Luke Skywalker leaves Yoda’s cave, the story reverts to old-fashioned, swashbuckling battles between “good” and “evil.”

The whole series is called Star WARS, after all.

The assumption is, it seems, that we’ll expand across the universe on a never-ending wave of force and coercion, aggression, and warfare.

The Star Wars stories depict it in exactly that way, as generally do the Star Trek epics, Avatar, Dune, and hundreds of other popular visions of humanity’s future.

The writers have created aggressors against whom their heroes must defend themselves and their beliefs, just as earthbound human rulers have forever demonized “enemies” against whom they could march their armies. These Star Wars are framed as a struggle against tyranny. And there are plenty of examples throughout history where warfare has apparently served to defend the vulnerable and to repel aggressors. At least that’s generally how history gets written.

We are compelled to engage the Force because otherwise the universe would be ruled by evil.

Even in sci-fi fantasies—some of our most idealistic fiction— it seems we are generally unable to sustain a narrative without warfare and war “heroes.” The “good” people prevail because they are better ... at aggression and warfare.

Interestingly, the heroes often have mixed feelings. In Star Wars Episode II, titled Attack of the Clones, Anakin Skywalker describes the Jedi philosophy:

Attachment is forbidden. Possession is forbidden. Compassion, which I would define as unconditional love, is essential to a Jedi’s life. So you might say that we are encouraged to love.

Unfortunately, Anakin eventually surrenders to the “dark side” of the Force, and becomes Darth Vader, the chief enforcer for an oppressive, authoritarian empire. Then finally he repents, saves the hero, and kills the emperor.

The battle between good and evil can, and does, get waged within the individual. Maybe every individual.

Perhaps it’s a battle waged mostly within ourselves.

But throughout dozens of sequels and knock-offs and thousands of dead “enemies,” “good” triumphs over “evil” in Star Wars thanks mostly to our heroes’ skill in deploying light sabers, starfighters, Republic attack cruisers, and other forms of military hardware—supported by the Force, naturally.

That makes for good stories. But history doesn’t support the popular plotline.

Power based on force has been, historically, very hard to sustain. What’s more sustainable, it seems, is power and influence based on compassion, kindness, and love.

Every militarized society since the beginning of recorded human history has declined comparatively quickly.

Some notable examples:

• The Akkadian Empire ruled the area defined by modern-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey for just 200 years, about 4,300 years ago.

• Persia ruled a huge territory encompassing the Balkans, Egypt, and stretching to the Indus Valley in India. It lasted about 200 years and collapsed 2,300 years ago.

• China’s Han Dynasty expanded to include modern China, and some of Vietnam and Korea, lasting about 400 years until it collapsed almost 2,000 years ago.

• Based in what is modern-day Syria, the Umayyad Caliphate ruled much of Spain, North Africa, and from the modern Middle East all the way to the westernmost districts of India for only about 90 years until a revolution took it down 1,300 years ago.

• Mongolians ruled a huge area stretching from Central Europe to the Sea of Japan starting from the time of Genghis Khan over 800 years ago, for about 160 years.

• The Romans came closest to establishing a permanent empire, once ruling England, Europe, and the Middle East. It endured in one form and then another for roughly 1,500 years, gradually petering out and finally disappearing altogether about 575 years ago.

• Some of the most celebrated conquerors, Alexander the Great and Napoleon for instance, sustained their rule only briefly. Alexander the Great ruled for 13 years; Napoleon for 15.

More recently, the Spanish, the Russians, and the British have made very short-lived attempts at extending their social identities and ideas across the globe. Some would argue that the United States has been up to something similar, as we have maneuvered to maintain our primacy as the “leader of the free world.”

History seems to teach us, though, that military power is tough to maintain for more than a few hundred years.

Faith and devotion to transcendent human values like compassion have shown much greater staying power:

• Hinduism is at least 4,000 years old with approximately 1.2 billion followers today.

• Judaism has been around for 3,500 years and has about 15 million adherents now.

• Buddhism is about 2,500 years old and more than 500 million people actively study the teachings of the Buddha today.

• Christianity is a bit younger, founded about 2,000 years ago, but is the most widespread religion in the world now with about 2.4 billion followers.

• Islam has been around for 1,400 years, with about 1.9 billion active worshipers now.

Smaller numbers of people remain devoted to Jainism (2,800 years old), Confucianism (2,600 years old), Shinto (2,300 years old), and Sikhism (500 years old).

All the ancient religions with a weighty presence in today’s world are deeply concerned with mercy and compassion. Hindus are ardently devoted to ahimsa—literally, “non-aggression”—the belief that we should exercise love, kindness, and compassion toward all living things. In the daily prayers of devout Muslims, compassion is mentioned at least seventeen times. Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism all hold lovingkindness among their most fundamental and treasured values. Sikhism, while not as ancient, upholds the principle of seva, selfless service.

So perhaps it’s not “the Force” that most powerfully connects and energizes human beings. Perhaps, as Anakin Skywalker once implied, it’s “the Compassion.”

Naturally, our religious institutions aren’t any more perfect than their followers, who are human beings after all. The dungeon masters of various Christian inquisitions tortured or killed thousands of “heretics” across Europe for about 600 years. The large Muslim minority in Myanmar has faced various forms of restriction and persecution from the Buddhist-majority population since 1948, and prejudice against the group has existed for centuries. It’s illegal even to profess any faith except Islam in over a dozen Muslim countries. And so on.

But the consistency and persistence of the human impulse toward compassion and love are remarkable and wonderful, nonetheless.

The role of a bodhisattva meshes in an interesting way with my avocation as a farmer.

A common and astute question people ask us about farming is, “Isn’t that a lot of work?” A common answer from me is, “Well, not compared with golf.”

We organized our farm to require as little daily labor as possible. There are automatic waterers in every pasture that work pretty well to provide a reliable source of fresh, clean drinks. Most of the year, the herds feed on the grass that grows naturally here in sufficient abundance. When the grass doesn’t grow, we feed big bales of hay. An hour’s tractor work delivering the hay can feed the animals for a week.

Farming is not nearly as much work as trying to live forever.

There are a few daily chores, of course, the most important of which is walking around and looking at things. We can tell, at a glance, if the cattle or sheep are stressed. They stand differently and move differently. We look for separated individuals. We watch the dogs for signs that they sense predators nearby.

In general, our attention is more important than any particular skill. When we notice something we should change, we figure out how to do that.

In return, we receive many rewards for our attentiveness. I’m sure I’ve seen many more sunrises and sunsets than I would have if I had spent my chore hours in bed. I’ve seen moons wreathed in glowing mist; felt the unique sparkle of mixed snow and rain on my skin; watched skunks and possums making their livings by the light of the stars.

We are compelled to pay attention. Paying attention enhances our experience. That’s one big reason I farm.

The farm is intriguing, stimulating, surprising, and beautiful.

In a word, it’s very, very interesting.

And from the bodhisattva perspective, so is the rest of the world.

Once we accept responsibility for the well-being of our fellow creatures, everything is relevant. Everything. There are no neutral phenomena. Everything happening affects someone in positive or negative ways—or, more often, both. With the vow, I promised to try to pay attention in a compassionate but non-judgmental Buddhist way.

That seems to have given me a chance to see the world in more vivid colors. When I’m attentive, as I’ve promised, it seems nothing is uninteresting. On the contrary. Things are very interesting, indeed.

I’m not just talking about a drought in the Horn of Africa or a disease outbreak in central China or a war in Central Europe or the Middle East. Those events are important and impactful and worth addressing to the extent we can. But so is a friend’s habit of ridiculing herself in conversation. Or a new local law allowing the homeless to live in tents beside the river. Or the question of whether to buy recycled toilet paper. When our goal is to reduce suffering, there’s no shortage of material to work with!

That could be overwhelming. We can’t attend to everything.

So I felt an incongruous sense of relief when I promised to keep paying attention forever.

I don’t get to retire.

But I don’t have a deadline, either.

I don’t need to solve anything in this lifetime.

In a way, the preposterous notion of helping every sentient being attain enlightenment provides a nice context for our compassionate feelings. The task is immense, so immense that we may be relieved of the burden of solving anything significant on our own, or during our present lives. Instead, we are called to pay attention, to be curious, and to do what we can where we are, and when we are. For me, that stays very interesting. And being interested improves my experience of life.

It seems to me that focusing on the benefit of others has provided me with a great blessing, perhaps inevitably, in return. And that blessing, just like good manure, can be turned back into the soil to benefit others. As far as a bodhisattva is concerned, genuine benefit to one of us is beneficial to us all.

The first time I heard about it, it took my breath away.

Many Buddhists take what is called the Bodhisattva Vow. Different from other religious vows, it is more literally an aspiration, or resolution. The person taking the vow promises to try to live for the benefit of others. But not just for this lifetime. Since Buddhists have traditionally believed in the reincarnation of each individual’s spirit, the bodhisattva promises to try to live for the benefit of others through infinite lifetimes, “until all have attained nirvana.”

In other words, the bodhisattva promises to keep coming back to this world of suffering until every other sentient being has attained psychological and spiritual liberation—ultimate peace and happiness.

No heaven for us, until everyone else is in heaven. This may take a long time. We promise to return, after the death of our present bodies, and go back to work.

It’s hard for me to say why, exactly, this struck such a strong chord with me. It was something about giving up the idea of an individual victory. Other spiritual traditions promise a payoff: If we’re good enough, in this life, we can escape this difficult and painful existence and live forever in paradise. Christianity and Islam both generally promise a big win for those who are good, and eternal damnation for those who are not. Most Hindu traditions suggest that our reincarnated lives will just keep getting better and better, if we’re good. While some versions of Buddhism do that also, the emphasis on the Bodhisattva path is not about going to heaven. It’s about volunteering to stand in the back of the line.

In general, getting credit for good behavior, the immediate reward of a spot in heaven, is pretty well baked into a lot of spirituality. The Bodhisattva Vow was the first place I ever encountered the idea that we might commit ourselves to coming back to work, being as good as we can be, and helping others, maybe forever—not with personal reward in mind, but working for everyone’s benefit.

That’s a big commitment. I mean, the idea that we might aspire to live for the benefit of others is pretty intimidating by itself. The notion that we might volunteer to be reincarnated in this world of struggle, again and again, is sort of awful, which is part of the reason it took me many years before I stepped up and took the Bodhisattva Vow myself.

In general, I find myself pretty leery of vows. But I’m glad for my wedding vows. And I’m glad I took the Bodhisattva Vow.

The ceremony for my vow was written about nine hundred years ago by a teacher named Gampopa in Tibet.

Still, the contents seem pretty relevant:

• People will always have troubles and hangups.

• All people are, in some sense, our fathers and mothers. Ultimately, we’re intimately related to everyone and everything.

• We should view every person as having been a kind parent or gentle child to us.

• These kind parents and children are suffering. They are exhausted.

• We want them to be happy.

• From now on, I will try to help them.

And the ceremony spelled out what we want for everyone:

“May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.”

“May they be free from suffering and the root of suffering.”

“May they not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.”

“May they dwell in the great equanimity free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.”

Like my marriage vow, the Bodhisattva Vow changed my experience of daily life immediately and enduringly. In both cases, I committed my life to others.

Of course, I have frequently fallen short of the standards, in both cases. That can probably go without saying.

But the gift I received when I took the Bodhisattva Vow was the brilliant illumination of the fact that there will be no big win for me as an individual. I promised to try to be helpful. I promised to keep on trying to be helpful, if I can, until there’s no one left to help.

I was never completely comfortable with the idea that I might go to heaven and leave others behind. Or that I would live forever, while others would not.

Specifically, what about my poor, addicted son? My jolly, agnostic aunt? My volatile friend in prison for assault? It always felt wrong to me that I would win and they would lose, that I might move on to some paradise and leave them behind—or, worse, that they would suffer forever while I floated around, blissful, on some perfect cloud. That felt, well, uncompassionate to say the least. That did not seem like a system that our broken-hearted God would design.

The vow ceremony explicitly acknowledges that we are far from perfect, that we are undertaking the work as people who are bumbling around in the messy real world. We don’t wait to perfect ourselves or become “enlightened” before we set out to help others. We seek to improve ourselves through our work. And it’s all trial and error. We have stated our intention to try to help. We keep that intention in mind as we wander and stumble about, committed to permanent amateurism with all that entails, including a lot of love and a lot of learning.

Read The Bodhisattva Vow Part II:

We’re beginning to understand that healthy soil contributes directly to the health of our bodies, and our brains.

We’re just beginning to study the myriad health effects of changes in the populations of microorganisms in human bodies, which are generally referred to as the human “biome.” We know quite a bit about specific gut organisms that can make us sick— typhoid, Shigella, Salmonella, and so on—but very little about the thousands of species that beneficially share the space within our skin. We’re beginning to understand that our microbial cohabitants can have critical positive effects on our health.

There’s a bunch of new evidence that the health and diversity of a person’s biome has a profound effect on individual health, and studies have connected a lack of biome diversity to obesity, heart disease, and astonishingly, a number of psychiatric diseases.

The microorganisms in your stomach and intestines, it seems, can influence your moods and even prevent depression.

The longest nerve in your body is the vagus or pneumogastric nerve, which connects your brain to your heart, lungs, and digestive system. It also branches off to the laryngeal nerve to affect speech, and to sensitize parts of your ears. It creates your gag reflex. If the vagus nerve is stimulated by something perceived as harmful in your stomach, it makes you vomit.

Artificially stimulating the vagus nerve can help patients with severe depression. A damaged vagus nerve can cause chronic fatigue, seizures, and panic attacks.

Parkinson’s disease is believed to start in the gastrointestinal system and spread, via the vagus nerve, to the brain. Scientists are investigating the possibility that abnormal proteins in the gut may be sending messages through the vagus nerve that have a negative effect on the dopamine reward system, and that this negative effect could eventually induce Parkinson’s disease.

We don’t yet have an understanding of the microbes’ role in all this. We know that most of the nonhuman living things within our bodies are in the gut. We know our biggest neural pathway, the vagus nerve, carries information from the digestive system to the brain.

So just how many of our thoughts and moods are influenced— or dictated—by the microbes? That, we don’t know.

And where do our gut bacteria come from? Ultimately, the soil.

Unhealthy soil can create an unhealthy gut, which may, in turn, create an unhealthy mind.

The trillions of living things that share our bodies migrate in through our food, drink, and air. When you pick up a bell pepper at the farmer’s market, put it down, and then rub your eye, you’ve most likely distributed some of your biome to the environment, and some of the environment’s biome to your body. And so, with each passing moment, your body transforms with the introduction or depletion of its residents, and mixes with the world around you.

This might be disturbing. It’s certainly disruptive. We have, after all, been trained to avoid “contamination” by “germs.” But from another perspective,

I sometimes feel thrilled by the notion that my existence isn’t circumscribed by my skin, my brain, or even my species.

It feels like an honor, and a little weird, to be part of the “superorganism” that covers this planet—carrying on our immense, communal life around the globe, as it has for eons.

“Interdependence” is a word Buddhist writers sometimes use to describe the essential fabric of the superorganism. The nature of every single thing is influenced by the characteristics and behaviors of every other single thing. We are thoroughly and infinitely interdependent.

Some writers and teachers refer to our universe as “non-dual.” Any perception of separateness is, in a way, an illusion. We perceive the moon and the sun as separate, in the sky, but what we perceive as the moon is actually the sun’s light bouncing off the moon’s surface, into our eyes. And the energy we are using to activate our eyes, optic nerves, and brains is, in fact, the sun’s energy, carried in all the forms we call food, transformed into our vitality. Everything going on when we look up into a clear sky is intimately connected and can’t really be separated into the perceiver or the perceived; the object or the light source; the person or the heavens.

Maybe it’s ludicrous to feel compassion toward the sun, in spite of our intimate relationship with it. On the other hand, perhaps we should open our hearts to the plants whose photosynthesizing cells convert the sun’s light into energy, whose respirations pump precious oxygen into our air and whose leaves and seeds form the basis of our food chains.

Compassion, in the context of our superorganism, is also self-interest.

The two can’t be divided. The health of our bodies and minds is directly dependent on the health of our world. The most impactful way to protect ourselves and our loved ones is to protect the health of everything and everyone else.

We accuse narcissists of “navel-gazing.” It’s ironic, then, (and amusing) that to contemplate our own navels, stomachs, intestines, and organs is, in fact, to contemplate a vast population of creatures that live there, and influence our lives in profound and mysterious ways.

We’re building garden beds and withholding the rototiller because, in part, we are worried about Jojo. We have, as they say, a “soft spot in our hearts” for that turtle. We don’t want to hurt him with our machine.

That sweet, common emotion connects many layers of aspiration, desire, love, and interdependence among the stars, the turtle, the grub worms, the soil microbes, the dung beetles, the vegetables, our stomachs, and, ultimately, our minds.

We are they, and they are us.

A few days ago I found myself riding for two hours in the cab of a truck with a young man who was a stranger to me.

Respecting his privacy, I’ll call him Tom.

I had a car accident in a small town 100 miles from my home. It was a minor accident, but our car was not drivable. Tom brought the tow truck. The only way for my wife and me to get home that night was in the truck, and he agreed to take us along.

Tom looked to be in his 30s, and later he told us he was 35. As he moved around his truck, strapping our car on to the flatbed, we could see that moving was painful for him. It looked like something very bad had happened to one, or both, of his legs.

“How did you get banged up?” I asked him.

“Motorcycle accident nine months ago,” he said. “I broke both my legs. I have four pins in this one and three pins in that one. I was in a wheelchair until a couple of months ago. It was my second bad wreck. The first time I broke one leg pretty bad.”

“Are you riding again now?” I asked.

“Sure!” he said cheerfully.

If you ever consider taking a long car ride with me, or if you end up sitting next to me on an airplane, I will warn you that there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll strike up a conversation and find you interesting. I find most people, and their stories, interesting. I know it might be more courteous to remain reserved in that kind of chance encounter, but I’ve met a lot of interesting people. I might regret not meeting you. So, I’ll probably talk to you, and I’ll take the hint (I hope) if you seem to want your privacy.

Tom didn’t give me any of those hints. Not that I noticed, anyway.

Tom lives in a small town in southeastern Kansas. He owns a car-repair shop, and an earth-moving company with a backhoe and an excavator. In his spare time, he sometimes drives a truck for his brother’s tow company. He recently sold part of a farm, a rental property and an airplane in order to pay for the construction of a new house on a nice pond. He’s hoping to move into the new house soon, but his injuries prevented him from finishing some of the construction himself, so he was depending on subcontractors.

Routinely, Tom spends his days fixing cars, moving dirt and repairing his rental houses. Once a year he goes to Sturgis, South Dakota, for the big annual motorcycle rally there. That’s where he broke his legs last year.

Tom, you can tell, believes in staying busy.

He has an 11-year-old son who lives with Tom’s ex. He says he bought the boy a 3/4-ton pickup to drive around on the farm and back roads. He and his son both love dirt bikes.

He regrets selling the airplane. He loves flying. He’s flown friends hundreds of miles for medical appointments and family visits.

He doesn’t have a pilot’s license.

“I took lessons, of course,” he says, “but I got fed up with the flying instructor and all his details. It wasn’t a complicated airplane. I could fly it fine. It may take me a while, but I’ll get another one.”

Tom said he was miserable, confined to a wheelchair. He didn’t like physical therapy or the exercise bike prescribed by his doctors. He wanted to get busy again, out in the world.

Tom didn’t grow up in Kansas. His father owned a large inter-state fencing company, based in California. Tom grew up in Bakersfield. When he was a young adult, his dad moved to Kansas. After a short stint in college (“It wasn’t good for me,” he says.), Tom joined his father and his older brother in the small town where he now lives.

“Is your dad still around?” I ask him.

“No. He died 11 years ago.”

“He must have been young.”

“Fifty-seven.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “How did he die?”

“Suicide,” Tom says.

“I’m sorry,” I say again. “That’s a tough thing.”

“We’re OK,” Tom says in his upbeat way. “He was around to raise us. I guess he got the job done, more or less.”

I’ve never loved someone who committed suicide, exactly. But my son’s descent into addiction and the drinking binge that killed him were, in some ways, very similar to a suicide. The world where he lived, and the people who loved him, could not ease his pain enough.

Only drugs, alcohol, or death could do that, evidently.

Very often when grief comes up in a conversation, I think the only helpful thing you can do is share yours. I told Tom about our son, Noah. He said, “I don’t go for the drugs.”

The death of anyone we love is painful. When the death is self-inflicted, we feel the added pain of rejection, helplessness and even our possible responsibility. Why couldn’t we make them happy? Did we not love them enough? Did we express our love the wrong way? Might we have been responsible? How could they leave us behind like this?

I thought Tom’s bravado and hyperactivity might be anaesthetics. Clearly, he works very hard and doesn’t leave much time for reflection. And then there are the repeated, near-fatal motorcycle accidents and his cowboy approach to flying an airplane.

He knows how to drive trucks and heavy equipment. He knows how to fly an airplane. He can build a house. Evidently, he knows how to make a good living. But I found myself wondering, does he know how to live with his grief?

I know, from personal experience, that getting busy can ease our pain of grief. I have sometimes made myself busy for precisely that purpose. Busy work. Busy thoughts, Busy habits.

And, indeed, the process of putting one foot in front of another is fundamental to living. That’s how we work our way through life’s pitfalls, predicaments and tragedies.

I think I even understand, to a degree, how risking our lives can make us feel a little closer to our loved ones who risked, or took, their own. We may not understand why they did what they did, but it seems like our understanding might improve if we followed them part of the way there.

Ultimately, I don’t think anaesthetics or risky behavior help us. They may, for a time, allow us to keep going. But grief is still here when we lie down to sleep, or come back from the edge.

I wish I could have said something that might have helped Tom, even a little bit. But Tom isn’t asking for help. I believe he doesn’t want to be perceived as needing help. I get that. Even if he were asking for help, I can’t ease the pain. I can only share my own experience, and that might not help at all.

It wouldn’t provide Tom with a path.

So when he let us out of the truck, I told him to do his physical therapy, and Carolyn told him to ride his exercise bike. We tried to let him know that we cared about him a little. It seemed like that was all we had to offer.

A few days ago I found myself riding for two hours in the cab of a truck with a young man who was a stranger to me.

Respecting his privacy, I’ll call him Tom.

I had a car accident in a small town 100 miles from my home. It was a minor accident, but our car was not drivable. Tom brought the tow truck. The only way for my wife and me to get home that night was in the truck, and he agreed to take us along.

Tom looked to be in his 30s, and later he told us he was 35. As he moved around his truck, strapping our car on to the flatbed, we could see that moving was painful for him. It looked like something very bad had happened to one, or both, of his legs.

“What did you do to get banged up?” I asked him.

“Motorcycle accident nine months ago,” he said. “I broke both my legs. I have four pins in this one and three pins in that one. I was in a wheelchair until a couple of months ago. It was my second bad wreck. The first time I broke one leg pretty bad.”

“Are you riding again now?” I asked.

“Sure!” he said cheerfully.

If you ever consider taking a long car ride with me, or if you end up sitting next to me on an airplane, I will warn you that there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll strike up a conversation and find you interesting. I find most people, and their stories, interesting. I know it might be more polite to remain reserved in that kind of chance encounter, but I’ve met a lot of interesting people. I might regret not meeting you. So, I’ll probably talk to you, and I’ll take the hint if you seem to want your privacy.

Tom didn’t give me any of those hints. Not that I noticed, anyway.

Tom lives in a small town in southeastern Kansas. He owns a car-repair shop, and an earth-moving company with a backhoe and an excavator. In his spare time, he sometimes drives a truck for his brother’s tow company. He recently sold part of a farm, a rental property and an airplane in order to pay for the construction of a new house on a nice pond. He’s hoping to move into the new house soon, but his injuries prevented him from finishing some of the construction himself, so he was depending on subcontractors.

Routinely, Tom spends his days fixing cars, moving dirt and repairing his rental houses. Once a year he goes to Sturgis, South Dakota, for the big annual motorcycle rally there. That’s where he broke his legs last year.

Tom, you can tell, believes in staying busy.

He has an 11-year-old son who lives with Tom’s ex. He says he bought the boy a 3/4-ton pickup to drive around on the farm and back roads. He and his son both love dirt bikes.

He regrets selling the airplane. He loves flying. He’s flown friends hundreds of miles for medical appointments and family visits. He doesn’t have a pilot’s license.

“I took lessons, of course,” he says, “but I got fed up with the flying instructor and all his details. It wasn’t a complicated airplane. I could fly it fine. It may take me a while, but I’ll get another one.”

Tom said he was miserable, confined to a wheelchair. He didn’t like physical therapy or the exercise bike prescribed by his doctors. He wanted to get busy again, out in the world.

Tom didn’t grow up in Kansas. His father owned a large inter-state fencing company, based in California. Tom grew up in Bakersfield. When he was a young adult, his dad moved to Kansas. After a short stint in college (“It wasn’t good for me,” he says.) Tom joined his father and his older brother in the small town where he now lives.

“Is your dad still around?” I ask him.

“No. He died 11 years ago.”

“He must have been young.”

“Fifty-seven.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “How did he die?”

“Suicide,” Tom says.

“I’m sorry,” I say again. “That’s a tough thing.”

“We’re OK,” Tom says in his upbeat way. “He was around to raise us. I guess he got the job done, more or less.”

I’ve never loved someone who committed suicide, exactly. But my son’s descent into addiction and the drinking binge that killed him were, in some ways, very similar to a suicide. The world where he lived, and the people who loved him, could not ease his pain enough.

Only drugs, alcohol, or death could do that, evidently.

Very often when grief comes up in a conversation, I think the only helpful thing you can do is share yours.

I told Tom about our son, Noah. He said, “I don’t go for the drugs.”

The death of anyone we love is painful. When the death is self-inflicted, we feel the added pain of rejection, helplessness and even our possible responsibility. Why couldn’t we make them happy? Did we not love them enough? Did we express our love the wrong way? Might we have been responsible? How could they leave us behind like this?

I thought Tom’s bravado and hyperactivity might be anesthetics. Clearly, he works very hard and doesn’t leave much time for reflection. And then there are the repeated, near-fatal motorcycle accidents and his cowboy approach to flying an airplane.

He knows how to drive trucks and heavy equipment. He knows how to fly an airplane. He can build a house. Evidently, he knows how to make a good living. But I found myself wondering, does he know how to live with his grief?

I know, from personal experience, that getting busy can ease our pain of grief. I have sometimes made myself busy for precisely that purpose. Busy work. Busy thoughts, Busy habits.

And, indeed, the process of putting one foot in front of another is fundamental to living. That’s how we work our way through life’s pitfalls and predicaments.

I think I even understand, to a degree, that risking our lives can make us feel a little closer to our loved ones who risked, or took, their own. We don’t understand why they did what they did, but our understanding might improve if we followed them part of the way there.

Ultimately, I don’t think anesthetics or risky behavior help us. They may, for a time, allow us to keep going. But grief is still here when we wake up or come back from the edge.

I wish I could have said something that might have helped Tom, even a little bit. But Tom isn’t asking for help. I believe he doesn’t want to be perceived as needing help. I get that. Even if he were asking for help, I can’t ease the pain. I can describe my own experience, but that might not help at all.

It wouldn’t provide Tom with a path.

So when he let us out of the truck, I told him to do his physical therapy, and Carolyn told him to ride his exercise bike. We tried to let him know that we cared about him a little.

I believe we are culpable.

The issue arises in almost every moment of every day. I’m in my little office right now, in the basement of my ranch house in Kansas, drinking a can of sparkling water and trying to write something beneficial. That might sound pretty virtuous.

In fact, the writing on my can of water includes the message, “0-Calorie + 0-Sweetener + 0-Sodium = INNOCENT!”

I don’t think so.

I could just as easily be drinking a glass of tap water, which would have saved the manufacturing, packaging and transportation necessary to bring that can of bubbly water to my refrigerator. I have a computer and two large, brightly illuminated screens in front of me. Five lamps light up the room. And I’m snacking on homegrown beef jerky made from Boris, our former bull. Ex-bull? Late bull? Anyway, you get the picture.

I could make do with one screen, one lamp, some organic peanuts and a glass of tap water. I have chosen not to, and so I am culpable for the extra electricity, the extravagant drink, and Boris.

I’m not feeling maudlin or guilty. But it seems silly to pretend I’m not culpable.

I miss Boris. He was a good guy. He was always playful when I brought hay out to the cattle. He would romp around the tractor, butt the new bale of hay and make comical little lunges at me, as though he was going to attack. I never took him seriously. I could tell it was all in fun.

But many of the calves in our pasture are Boris’ daughters. So in the interest of animal husbandry I decided Boris had to go. From a farming perspective it was a sound decision. But I am culpable (and sad), nonetheless, for Boris’ death.

When I am fully awake to the consequences of my decisions, my actions and ultimately my very existence, there is a persistent sadness that comes with the wakefulness.

The literal translation of the Sanskrit word karma is action. Any action. For Buddhists the concept of karma reminds us that everything we do has infinite consequences. We try to remain aware of that, in every moment, and to live in a way that is helpful, or less harmful.

Of course that idea can get pretty heavy. We might find ourselves weighed down by constant thoughts of the infinite consequences.

But ultimately, we can’t really know the consequences. We might delay a friend on the way to the airport, causing them to miss a flight that crashes. We delayed our friend, thoughtlessly, and probably apologized before we realized we had saved their life.

That’s karma. Infinite, and unknowable, consequences.

If we can’t, ultimately, understand or control the consequences, then how do we generate positive karma?

I think the only thing we can control to any meaningful degree is our intentions. Positive karma is generated by positive intentions. Negative intentions, no matter how socially acceptable the action might be, generates negative karma.

And none of it generates any innocence, no matter what my soda can says.

Yesterday I took a break between farm chores and stopped by the pond. I didn’t have any particular reason to stop at the pond, except that I realized as I was passing by how seldom I stop to look at it.

It’s not a special pond, really. It’s deep and spring-fed, but for the past few years the water level has been low and in summer it’s been clogged with algae. A few of the trees along the bank have died and fallen over, and we’ve generally just left them there, random branches sticking up out of the water.

As I sat looking at it yesterday, though, I thought it was really beautiful. The spring rains have filled it and water is flowing over a spillway and into one of our low pastures. The sun was shining off the surface of the water and in the shade near the bank where I was sitting I could see that hundreds, or thousands, of small fish were feeding at the surface.

Then I had a visitor.

For a few years we’ve been noticing Green Herons living and nesting at the pond. They are a beautiful bird, green and blue and russet and black, with a speckled sash across their bellies and a stylish little crest on their heads. Their legs are bright yellow. They are famously shy, so we generally see them flying for cover when we approach.

But yesterday one of these cautious little crow-sized herons flew out of a tree and landed on a half-submerged tree limb just 20 feet from where I was sitting.

I watched it stalk up and down the limb and then freeze, staring at the water. Then its neck darted out and it had a little fish in its bill, which it gobbled down. Then it caught another one, this one entangled in a slimy strip of pond weed. It shook the fish, which appeared to be a baby catfish, until the weed fell away and that fish was gobbled down as well.

I noticed a weird gargling croak in a nearby tree, and then a second Green Heron flew at my companion and chased it off. The new heron took over the fishing station, and I made a video of it as it caught two fish in about 30 seconds.

I didn’t realize at the time how rare it is to be so close to Green Herons for so long. Veteran birders report that they’ve never seen one, or only glimpsed one as it flew for cover. They are not rare, but they are famously shy. They are also famous for their cleverness. They are one of only a few bird species that are known to use tools. The little herons drop insects, feathers or twigs into the water to lure fish.

These herons were squabbling over that little corner of our little pond, I suppose, because a dead tree limb I had left in the water was suspended perfectly across six feet of the water’s surface where shade and sunshine were interspersed in the morning light.

It was a perfect fishing spot for a heron. It seems it was perfect enough that the herons were willing to hang out close to me. That felt like quite a privilege.

It struck me that I probably wouldn’t have had that privilege if I had pulled the dead tree out of the pond when it fell over. It’s possible that we wouldn’t even have the herons at the pond if we hadn’t inadvertently provided them with the fishing station, or if we had groomed the pond’s brushy banks where they hide.

A bigger half-submerged tree near the center of the pond is a favorite sunning spot for big slider turtles. I’ve seen as many as a dozen of them lined up on that log.

During the last few dry summers we were tempted to sweep the green, mossy pond clean: to remove the dead trees, dredge the bottom and maybe even treat it, chemically, to kill the algae. But that’s not generally how we’ve done things on our farm.

When insects wipe out one of our garden vegetables, we usually replant it for a few more years to see what happens. Often, the pestilent species does not return, or comes back in much smaller numbers so the damage is minimal. Sometimes a predatory species appears to manage the pest.

When we started raising sheep we concluded that Carolyn and I didn’t have the bandwidth to assist with lambing, so we decided to leave the moms alone to see if they could handle the birthing on their own. They were pretty good at it, and within a few years we had bred a flock that seldom showed any sign of needing help, and our lambing mortality is lower than national averages.

Some sheep farmers I have known report helping with half the births in their flock.

Likewise with the cows, we don’t get involved with the birthing except in emergencies. In twenty-three years we’ve had two problem births and lost one heifer from a herd that has fluctuated between a dozen and thirty cows, generally giving birth every two years. They don’t give birth every year because we let the calves nurse as long as they want to, and that generally means the cows are only fertile every two years or so.

We let them be, and we watch to see how nature works. Usually, we find that nature works pretty well.

Of course we don’t depend on the calf crop to make our living. If we did I’m sure we would feel pressured to change the system so we had more calves to sell. But it’s been wonderful to see how well it all functions without our intervention.

I stopped at the pond yesterday thinking I might sit down for a meditation session. Meditation is, of course, the practice of letting things be for a little while. When I get up from work at my desk and move to my meditation cushion in the corner of the room, I’m consciously deciding to let things be for half an hour, or an hour, or whatever time I set. During that time I will just sit noticing my thoughts and feelings without judgment, and without action. For a little while I will just observe my own human nature, doing what it naturally does.

In a way it’s like leaving the dead trees in the pond or replanting the squash another year even though it’s been repeatedly destroyed by vine borers. I watch and observe what nature—my own nature—is going to create.

And often, but not always, nature has a way of working things out if we let it be.

So why do we tolerate unkindness in politicians, business leaders, celebrities and influencers?

Maybe if we all decided to make kindness a basic criterion for trust, we could change how the world works. Maybe a little at a time. Or maybe a lot.

I was sitting in my farm truck at the tire shop this morning, waiting for them to check my air pressure when a man I know walked out of the store and approached my truck. He walked all the way around it, looking.

This happens sometimes here in Truck Country. We like trucks.

After he made an admiring circuit around the vehicle, he stepped up to my window. “This is just a great truck,” he said.

I was wearing a hat and sunglasses so he hadn’t recognized me. “Thank you,” I said. When he heard my voice he laughed. “I had no idea this was you, Bryan!”

I realized then that Chris wasn’t stopping to say hi to me. He just wanted to tell some farmer with an 18-year-old truck that he liked his ride. Chris is like that. He looks for opportunities to be kind.

Chris works in the retirement home where my dad lives. We see each other often. He sees my dad every day.

Chris wanted to talk about what a sweet and kind man my father is. I agreed. Then he wanted to talk about how important kindness is, in this world. I agreed again.

Chris is, I think, an evangelical Christian. He’s part of an extended family that runs Dad’s independent living facility. I believe they attend a popular evangelical-style church just down the road from my dad’s place..

But I had concluded that they were faithful Christians before I knew that. I had drawn that conclusion from their behavior: modest, kind and honest. It seemed to me that they were modeling themselves on the example of Jesus. I’ve seen the difference in some Christians, qualities that set them apart from less faithful people. I thought I recognized that particular quality in the folks who work at Dad’s facility.

I admire that quality.

I’m not proselytizing for Christianity here. I’m not even a Christian, by most standards. I’m a practicing Buddhist. I’ve taken Buddhist vows. I study and teach Buddhist principles.

But maybe I am proselytizing, anyway. Maybe I’m proselytizing for kindness.

We live in a country today where on nearly every block in every town and city across the United States, people don’t feel they can trust each other. We are in the habit of feeling that those who don’t vote with us, are against us in every other sense as well. This mistrust makes us anxious and unhappy. We live under this anxious cloud all the time.

It’s not hard to track the origin of the mistrust. Politicians and the news media generate attention and support by demonizing one side or another. And the demonization doesn’t stop at the levels of policy or practice. Both sides assume the very worst of their opponents, and react gleefully when the other side is indicted, impugned or embarrassed.

Maybe that’s the nature of the political game, now. But I think it’s a sick game, and it could infect all of us.

I left Chris and went to my Dad’s to have lunch with him and his friends in their big community dining room. We were sitting with Ken, a retired oil executive, and his wife Betty. They celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary a few weeks ago. I consider them dear friends.

Somehow we got on the topic of kindness, and its disappearance from public life. We all feel sad about that. We shared that sadness.

I doubt Chris votes the way I do. I’m sure Ken and Betty do not.

Still, I find them easy to love. And it would be a terrible loss, for me, if I could not love them.

A few years ago, flipping through the radio dial, I happened upon a Christian preacher who was talking about love. “Jesus taught us that the greatest commandments are to love God, to love our enemies, and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Don’t you think we should master those things before we get too worried about anything else?”

“Amen,” I thought.

As Buddhists we study the teachings of a spiritual leader very similar, in many ways, to Jesus. We don’t have commandments, but we observe certain truths. Among those truths is the transcendent benefit of loving kindness.

Also, the fact that every act of aggression spawns more aggression.

I’m going to try to remember that my opinions, however correct they may be in my own estimation, don’t provide sufficient reason for me to be unkind.

And I’ll try to remember that the best way to counter aggression, if we really want to defeat it, is with kindness.

Lambing is a thrill every year. Over the course of a few weeks the babies all come and every morning reveals a blossoming of new life.

Of course we have only the grassland we own to nourish them, and that means every fall two-thirds of our sheep must be sold, most of them destined to become human food. Of course I’m tempted to keep more each year. We always ship some away that I would have loved to keep in our flock. But we’ve seen the environmental catastrophe that’s created by overgrazing. So we have to be disciplined.

It’s sad to think that the delightful and exuberant babies in our pastures today are destined to be killed and eaten. But in our natural world that’s the destiny of every prey animal. None of them grows old. And even when some creature manages to reach old age, death inevitably comes and their bodies become food—for the good fortune of other creatures.

We understand this. But it’s still sad.

Sadness permeates human life. Everything we love passes. Every person we love dies.

It’s tempting to ignore mortality. I have a version of human life in my head that’s just one happy delight after another. Of course, that’s delusional.

I might say that if we’re awake in this life, then sadness is a natural state of mind.

Thankfully, it’s no impediment to joy, or love. In fact I think both joy and love are more vivid and wonderful when they cohabitate, in our minds, with sadness.

That’s my experience, anyway.

Jojo with blackberry juice on his face

I stare in wonder at photographs from space telescopes of stars, galaxies, and exquisite nebulae the astronomers tell us are more than twelve billion light-years distant from Earth. I am, evidently, observing events that transpired seven billion years before our planet existed.

My own body, and yours, are formed from elements (oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and so on) that were formed within stars. The basic stuff we’re constructed from was most likely created in a succession of giant, exploding stars, supernovae, that scattered the elementary building blocks of our lives across the universe.

Our thoughts and our bodies are both products of the stars, in a very material and immediate way.

A realization that seems to naturally arise from meditation practice is “interdependence,” or “interconnectedness.” While it is intrinsic to Buddhist teachings, interdependence is also a natural recognition of, simply, the way things are. The more often we contemplate it, the more we start to see it everywhere, and to feel its authenticity. It’s a fact now being demonstrated over and over again by scientists: Everything we encounter, from the vast blue sky to the rumbling of our own stomachs, is the product of countless interrelated phenomena. Nothing is self-determined. Everything in our universe appears in a way that is shaped by an infinite web of conditions and influences.

And in that realization, we may find an inspiration to extend our compassion more broadly. After all, our kinship doesn’t end with our families, our communities, our species, or even our planet. Our kinship stretches across the universe.

Which leads me to think about Jojo.

Jojo is an ornate box turtle. He lives in our vegetable garden. We first encountered him about fifteen years ago, minding his own business among the okra.

At some point we learned he likes to eat a grub worm if you offer him one. Or a cherry tomato. Or a blackberry. He sometimes shows up for a shower when we turn on a sprinkler.

The first time we saw him, we figured he was passing through. He hung out with us for a few days, and then he was gone. We saw him again several weeks later, just about where he was the first time. Then he disappeared for the better part of a year.

They don’t call Jojo’s species “ornate” for nothing. He’s elaborately decorated. The top of his six-inch-long shell is a network of abstract rosettes in bright yellow on a dark green background. His face and front legs are dabbed with yellow circles, like bright little suns.

We’ve cohabited with Jojo for a decade and a half, but we don’t really know much about him. So when he appears, two or three times each summer, we’re delighted and fascinated by him.

Just last summer Carolyn witnessed, for the first time, Jojo disappearing. She found him half buried in a patch of mud, methodically kicking outward with his short legs, gradually descending into the muck. Box turtles in Kansas apparently spend a lot of time underground, sometimes as much as two feet deep below the frozen surface in winter.

The species was common and widespread across the Great Plains until we started plowing up the prairies.

A creature that needs grass, shade, and open water—and especially one that spends a great deal of time buried under a few inches of soil—can’t live where the ground is plowed and harrowed every year.

Lots of reptiles share our property. Brown water snakes thread across the surface of the pond. Large black rat snakes lurk in the pastures and occasionally visit the chicken house for a feast of eggs. We discover them there, once in a while, their bodies deformed in a series of egg-sized lumps.

Snapping turtles drag heavy, spiked shells through the grass. Skinks zip across the driveway on their tiny legs.

A few times each summer I discover I’ve killed a snake while mowing the grass. I hate that, but I haven’t figured out a way to prevent it. Even mowing very slowly I can’t seem to pick them out ahead of my mower in the grass, and they evidently don’t know how to avoid me and my destructive machine.

One of my fears is that I’ll hit Jojo, buried in the garden, with the rototiller. To maintain some control over the weeds, we till the soil at least a couple of times each summer. Every time, I wonder whether I’ll crush or dismember Jojo with the blades of the machine. Partly to minimize the tilling, we’ve been building raised garden beds from old lumber. It’s easier to control the weeds inside the beds and they can be cultivated by hand with a garden fork. Also, my aging body prefers gardening on a stool, so the raised beds place the produce—and the weeds—at a friendlier height.

Minimizing our tilling has other benefits as well. Soil is packed with life.

In a single gram (a quarter teaspoon, roughly) of healthy soil, scientists find two hundred million individual bacteria; a million fungi; a hundred thousand algae; ten thousand protozoa; and a thousand nematodes.

Tilling, just for one summer, can destroy two-thirds of those living things and then it takes years, or decades, for them to return.

Farming and gardening connect us with all these other living things being sustained by—and sustaining—this land. It’s a group project. When I sink a trowel in the garden soil to remove a thistle, my interests are obviously different than the thistle’s, not to mention the hundreds of millions of soil microbes whose lives I’m disturbing. But we’re all seeking our livelihood here, side by side, sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating. We all ultimately benefit from a healthy system. If we can contribute to the general well-being, we have a chance to improve life, in general, for lots of diverse creatures.

It’s spring! The grass has turned green. The birds are singing. The pond and the puddles are full of frogs. The pastures are full of lambs.

Every year, I find it wonderful. I walk around smiling at the lambs, smiling at the frogs. It’s thrilling, every year.

Of course new life is vulnerable. Even more vulnerable than the rest of us.

Even though we have over 100 lambs right now, I still have some that particularly attract my attention. A couple of days ago I found one of my favorites dead in the pasture, guarded by Hobbes. The livestock guardian dogs do that. When there’s a dead lamb they usually stay with it, guarding it until we take it away. Hobbes was on duty.

I was fond of this lamb because she was big, sturdy, especially playful and had a wonderful pattern of red spots across her body. She had dark eye-patches, which gave her face a beguiling expression. I thought she was special. I was very surprised to find her dead, because she had been so robust. There wasn’t a mark on her body or any perceivable injury. But she was dead. I carried her body away. Hobbes got up and went about his other business.

Of course the birds and the frogs kept singing. The sheep had already moved off to where they wanted to graze that day, all except the dead lamb’s mother who was hanging about where the body had lain, crying for her baby. It’s a sound that can’t be mistaken for any other in the world of sheep or the world of people. A bereaved mother’s voice is distinct and heartbreaking. She followed me part of the way toward the barn and then went back to the spot she had left. Still crying. She eventually joined the flock, but she kept calling for her lamb all day.

Most of the lambs come as twins but hers was a single, which is probably part of the reason the lamb was so strong.

And the birds and the frogs kept singing. And in a little while I found myself smiling again.

The birds and the frogs are so busy right now because they are getting ready for their own babies. Soon the nests will be full of nestlings. The pond and even the puddles will teem with tadpoles. There will be furry little raccoons in their dens. The opossums have been busy with parenthood for weeks already.

The mother opossums and raccoons will probably be headed to our pond tonight, and most nights this summer, to fish in the shallows for frogs and tadpoles. We’ll see the parents of barred owl nestlings sailing across the evening sky on their way to capture the babies of other birds, and carry them back to feed their own.

Just as we are thrilled and elated by the richness of new life, we could be appalled by the carnage which results.

Whatever system, or Intelligence, or God has created all this, it is a system that seems to stress diversity. Every pond and puddle has frogs in it, dozens of different species. When a creature evolves there seems always to be a neighbor creature evolved to kill and eat it. The vast majority of this year’s new babies will not survive until next winter. They will be killed to provide food to other new creatures, most of whom also will not survive for long.

As human beings we seem pretty determined to believe that each of us is special. When a loved one dies, especially a young person, we often say, “How could this happen? This isn’t supposed to happen!”

That is, for us, a natural reaction. But it isn’t a reaction that nature’s design seems to support.

It is wondrous, of course, that each person is unique: Billions of us, each of whom is singular in our appearance, our thoughts, our ideas and our emotions. Wow.

And I suspect the same is true of tadpoles and baby birds and opossums. Every one unique. Wow again.

And yet the system takes us all, many of us as babies, and our uniqueness disappears.

We are all unique. And none of us, it appears, is special.

(POSTSCRIPT: Midway through writing this, in my little office with its windows all shut tight, a frog began chirping in the room. I can’t explain this and I can’t prove it. I couldn’t find the frog, which seemed to be underneath an old cabinet. But the chirping continued for 15 minutes. I have never before heard a frog in the house. Take that for what you will.) - Bryan