Tonight I struggled with sending an email to a city official about an injustice where the city bureaucracy had finally won a victory over a friend by stalling and stonewalling and finally destroying records of the transaction. I worked on the email on and off during the evening, thinking about saving a draft but never did. Finally I pressed some wrong key and it was gone forever and I was unable to restore it. I tried to “restore” the computer to the point the email was lost but could not do this. I had my doubts about the letter; sometimes when you lose, it is best to be silent and move on no matter how just you think your cause. I took the accidental loss as a sign that maybe the email was not meant to be. I do not plan to rewrite it. This is difficult for me to do since I always want the last word when I think I am right. Yet one of the definitions for nonviolence that I like and use to describe Gandhi’s form of nonviolence is:
“Striving nonviolently to the point of sacrifice rather than fighting to attain one’s vision of truth.” The computer misstep made doing this easier tonight. From nature and the garden I should be learning this same point: letting go even when you feel an injustice has been done.
When a mistake is made in nature there is no going back in time and restoring it the way it was. For example my neighbor, like many others, over-fertilized his new lawn in his backyard last year. Now it is burnt and brown and all he can do is to plant it again with seed or sod.
Nature is constantly moving on. We have no control over it. The lives lost in the terrible cyclone in Myanmar this week cannot be restored by us. Life and Time moves on. The city bureaucracy won and my friend lost. All we can do is learn from the experience and move on. Where you find life, like in nature or in a good person, you find sacrifice.
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