The Homeless Person on the Train

(How Buddhist do I feel today?)

Pat Sparrowfish recently wrote a nice piece — ‘White Skin, Zen Bones: My Privilege and My Zen Practice’. I enjoyed Pat’s discussion on connectedness and interbeing, and how to handle these issues in real life. Despite my best endeavours, I sometimes (ok, often) find myself fighting to approach the world with an attitude of interbeing.

The train commute to/from work often provides me with an opportunity to test my practice. Here’s the type of scenario:

As a regular commuter, you have your little commuting routines, your ‘usual carriage’ and possibly even your favourite seats in that carriage. There are familiar faces around, although you’ve never spoken to any of your fellow creatures of habit.

As you board the train to work, there’s a whiff of stale booze and sweat. You weren’t out on the sauce last night, so you know it isn’t you. You head towards your usual seat, and spot the likely cause of the aroma. You know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the scruffy man sitting next to where you had intended to park yourself certainly looks like a homeless person. It was cold last night, and the poor chap probably had to drink himself into oblivion to get through the night, before seeking some warmth riding the early morning trains.

Before I stumbled into the world of Buddhism, my automatic reaction would have been to abandon my usual seating arrangement and promptly move out of smelling range from the homeless man. If the pong was really bad, and I was feeling a tad intolerant, I might even move to another carriage. I would take this course of action without thinking.

I don’t know if this is an instinctual reaction, or something learned. There is some logic to the instinctual reaction — the homeless person may still be drunk and potentially volatile, why take the risk? We may have learned to react this way from our parents, who didn’t want to expose their precious little kids to the harsh realities of the world. Whatever the cause of the reaction, the urge to move away and avoid the situation is strong.

In the past, I’d find a new seat, far enough away that I could effectively ignore the presence of the homeless man, and not think twice about it. Other than being frustrated that my usual routine had been disturbed.

Thanks to my interest in Buddhism, this type of scenario becomes much more challenging to deal with.

I now understand the power and importance of compassion. The homeless man has most likely had to deal with severe difficulties in his life. He has certainly experienced suffering. Meditation on compassion, and reading about the value of compassion, has planted a seed in my mind that I should look at the homeless man in a different way than I had in the past. Perhaps by sitting next to him, and maybe exchanging a few words, I might be able to offer some sort of comfort?

And then we have interbeing, or connectedness. On some level, the homeless man is connected to me (and everyone else on the train). There is really no distinction between the homeless man and me. Perhaps we are interchangeable. If I am connected to this man, I should not be repulsed by him, I should not avoid him.

What was once an easy situation to handle, is now a struggle. My gut still tells me to avoid, to move away. But my heart is starting to tell me to take my usual seat, or one nearby, to expose myself to the possibility of engaging in a positive way with a human being who deserves compassion, who lives in the same world as me, who is in some way linked to me.

I would guess that I have found myself in this type of situation about 20 times in the last few months. The avoidance urge has usually ‘won’ the battle, maybe 90% of the time. On the rare occasions that I have been able to adopt a more Buddhist approach, there has been anxiety or fear, but there has also been a deep sense of rightness.

I am learning that everyday life presents many opportunities to practice Buddhist principles. I am also learning that progress can be slow, and that instincts and conditioning need to be examined.