Humanity training

Saturday 31st July

Back (meanwhile) at the ranch it’s 2 a.m. You are asleep, maybe dreaming. At rest. At peace. Then it’s war.
Sirens sound. One’s beloved (momentarily, expletive deleted) baby is caterwauling. You’re up for the umpteenth time tonight – energywise it’s ‘gross’. Yes, go for it. All the expletives ... following which comes contemplation of one’s misfortune … the trap of having kids. The crying child gets the blame. But what’s to blame anyway? Nothing has actually gone WRONG. It’s just that, at 2 am, we’re feeling pissed off and speculating negatively about waking half the neighbourhood and the dangerous feelings of “being trapped”. This doesn’t help things run smoother at 2 am.
Here I am, standing in a dark room in the middle of the night, entertaining dangerous thoughts about ‘misfortune’. It’s 2 am and I should be asleep (or rather, down the road getting pissed at Jake’s party). Here I am with the f*****g baby crying. This feels like adversity.
And then it suddenly changes. It’s something else. The baby dropped off, you went back to bed. It’s all done and dusted for another night and another notch carved into the stick measuring your relationship to the child. By such situations we come closer to the ‘fait accompli’ of life.
I may be wide of the mark, not being a parent myself, but I’m trying to get to how we can all feel at times, about ‘my-bad-luck-in-life’, this sense of adversity-at-the-time. Yes, it clears up later perhaps but it feels very heavy at the time. Like bad weather when you can not see a sunny day ever coming again. When adversity visits us, how do we deal with it?
Picture the scene. The baby wakes up crying. You get up from a warm bed and face the work of the day, or in this case ‘night’. What happens then? A silver cloud of parental tolerance descends and magically transforms bad temper into radiant ‘humanity’ … and oh! Lucky are they, with children, who enjoy this exquisite pleasure every night and meet adversity with a cheerful smile. Nah! Of course it’s not like this. (Not always anyway!) But it seems to me that it’s right here, in this instance, where we most feel and suffer and enjoy the cutting edge of life. This is when we get pissed off most but learn ‘the humanity’ most too. When the baby continues to scream louder and louder, destroying the serenity of the night, extremes of toleration are tested. So, what’s the significance here, especially to vegans?
Perhaps these sorts of ‘crises’ simply bring us back to reality. For vegans, that we live amongst omnivores; for parents of small kids, that they live with a crying baby. We surround ourselves with testing situations, each one a launch pad for making humanity-training missions. (All this happens so routinely it hardly needs identifying). Each situation (at 2 am with child) forges the altruistic relationship-to-come, between child and parent, between loved and beloved. Tolerance (even under very trying circumstances!!) is ‘humanity’ teaching us.
Getting back to veganism, tolerating the ‘screaming child of the omnivore world’, never giving up on it, never leaving it behind even when noisy or smelly - that’s reality, that’s humanity training. We need to make many missions, many hours have to be put in. For vegans it’s a specific type of training we need to do – to train ourselves never to forget, even momentarily, our humanity towards both animals and omnivores.