A wise friend recently posed a question to a group that I belong to that has been sort of plaguing me: if, he asked, reincarnation is true and if, according to some tenets of the Buddhist faith, it is designed to offer us lessons not learned in past lifetimes, then what must our last lifetime have been like?
I imagine that the way people answer this question will be telling. Some may adopt a binary response with either “I must have been terrible before to deserve this life” or “I’m closer to Nirvana than ever before!” Others, such as the equally wise partner of the question’s originator, might re-frame the question to “what are the lessons I am supposed to be confronting with this particular life?”
Please know that I am not an advocate for literal reincarnation, but I like the opportunity to speculate about the lessons I might have been meant to learn along the present path:
- People are kind and generous. I know that there is evil in the world and that evil usually manifests itself in excessive self-focus. But more generally I find people to be empathic, helpful, and downright lovely. At least the people I run into boast these characteristics.
- There is a fundamental need for beauty. I listened to a TED talk the other day (Denis Dutton: biologically hard-wired for beauty) and marveled at how, well, marvelous works of art, theater, literature, dance are and how crucial they are to positive existence. I love living in the age of Instagram, where I can daily see the sunrise from my friend’s woodland home, witness the smile on a former student’s new baby, and see the first blooms of the season peek out from their wintery slumber.
- Skepticism beats gullibility any day. Had to learn that one the hard way but it stuck good and hard.
- Disappointment is disappointing. But everyone confronts it, I imagine, and I have had my share. I’ve done my best, I hope, to pick myself up and make the best of a disappointing situation. I’m fairly sure there will be more of it along the way…
- Speaking truth to power is hard…and often has consequences. If I was supposed to learn how to stop doing that I failed!
I know there are more, but these stand out to me as lessons I continue to confront. What about you? What lessons were you meant to learn from this turn around the wheel?