Sometimes people say things to a stranger that they wouldn’t tell their best friend.  Like the man who was my seatmate on an airplane recently who was telling me about his wife’s death.  “I miss her terribly,” he said.  And then he paused and added, “But I have to confess I’m glad it was her and not me.”

Well, of course.  Such a statement, while not conventional, should not surprising.  We are animal creatures and as such are first and foremost concerned about our own survival.  People sometimes give their lives to further a cause or to protect another, but our natural and wholly understandable tendency is to think “I’m glad it’s not me.”  I’m glad it’s not me who was just diagnosed with cancer, or who lost their job, or whose house was taken by the bank.  It’s not me whose child is doing drugs.  It’s not me whose husband ran off with his secretary.  It’s not me who is standing on the street corner, ragged and hungry.  Thank God, it’s not me.

But what if we began to understand that it could be us and that in fact one day it will be us.  Maybe the specifics of another’s loss will not be our loss–maybe we will not lose a child to an improvised bomb in Iraq, for example–but if we live long enough, and we have the capacity to love, we will be struck with terrible loss and grief.  People we love will die; careers will come to an end, some prematurely; disease will strike; the ravages of age will not pass us by.

So how is it that we prepare ourselves for these eventualities?  I think practicing empathy might be a spiritual discipline worthy of our attention.  When pain or tragedy comes to another, perhaps instead of breathing a sigh of relief and turning away, we might take a moment to try and “feel with” this other person and to invite compassion.  Not only would this practice deepen us spiritually and prepare us for life’s inevitable losses, but we would develop the understanding that we are not separate and apart from others, that we are in fact one.  It is an illusion to believe that we can separate ourselves from the pain of the world. 

But if we develop this kind of empathy, will we then travel our days sad and grief-stricken?  No, not at all.  To begin his spiritual awakening, the Buddha observed poverty and illness and aging for the first time.  To take in the realities of our existence–to own the fact that we are vulnerable and that we will one day die–requires great courage.  And yet to go there is ultimately freeing.  In a way, you might say our expectations have been considerably lowered, and we can let go of a lot of  anxiety–the unacknowledged fear that has been damping down our days.

Have you ever wondered why the Dalai Lama smiles so much?  I heard him speak a few years back when he visited Portland, and in the Q & A, someone asked, “What do you do for fun?”  He answered, “Jokes!”  This is someone whose country was ravaged by a foreign power, and most of its leaders, including many of its monks, killed.  The Dalai Lama travels the world as a religious leader, and he is a spokesperson for Tibet, of course.  But he has a kind of radical acceptance of life precisely as it is, and so joy does not escape him. 

It’s that spiritual paradox that’s so hard to understand, but that is the ground of all spiritual health: we have to lose our life to find it.