Ignorance is Curable

Angel On Five is the name of this drawing.  It represents what I imagine my pop saw in ’71 as he left his body.  He was 65, approaching the green on the fifth hole of his favorite golf course on a Saturday morning round with some buddies.  

He’d had a monster coronary a decade earlier, so you might say his death was less noteworthy than the circumstances: The way he always wanted to go, as they say.

It took a while for me to think of his departure so lovingly.  At the time, upon hearing the news, the first thing I said to myself was, “Thank god he’s off my back.” 

I was 27, yet to realize that no one is on our back unless we put them there.  All part of the great awakening that the only person who causes us grief is ourselves.  Especially if we’re inclined to feel, “I need this to be that in order to be happy.”  Loosening our belief around that wacky notion is an invitation the universe offers us in every breath we take.  

Sooner or later we give it a try, if only in despair, and peace increases, if only by the drop.  Our delusions may hang around for eons, but more and more we take them seriously less and less.  

In fact, someday we find ourselves tickled by the inkling of an epiphany: “Jeepers, every single event of my life can help me grow love.”

I’m now 14 years older than my father was when he played his final shot, and for years now I’ve held nothing but compassion for his entire life, including his harshness toward me.  

To him, I was the equivalent of someone from another planet he had no ability to control.  This he found especially unsettling, since control was essential to the parenting modeled by his own father. 

My dad wanted behavior that didn’t frighten him, that didn’t threaten how others might think of him, frankly.  He dreamed of sending me off to an Ivy League college in a sports car with the top down.  What I couldn’t have articulated at the time was that I was waiting for someone to introduce me to God, and since that person had yet to appear, adult wisdom in general was suspect.  My dad’s anger, sometimes to the point of violence, was no more than one of those sure things any of us experience when we’ve not yet learned to manage fear. 

Besides the fact that neither he, nor anyone else, has ever been responsible for how I feel about anything, even if my dad had been consciously trying to savage me (which he was not), his actions were born of ignorance, the cause of all harm we inflict on ourselves and others.  

By ignorance I mean our unawareness or denial that, as the Dalai Lama says, all human beings are the same as me—we all want to be happy.  The way I’ve come to understand it is: We’re all manifestations of God waking up to that reality. 

The power of inheritance is part of that awakening.  The ignorance my dad learned from his father, I learned from him, and it’s fair to say my children have learned from me.  

Thankfully, while such inheritance can be brutal, it’s not permanent.  Others may be unable to love us as we want, but only we are responsible for our healing.  Ignorance is curable.  Even if it can seem to take forever.