Today I’d like to share with you a small incident which happened a few weeks ago. It brings a smile to my face to recall it.
I was staying, with a lover, in a cheapish hotel in Kathmandu. The bathroom didn’t seem to have any ventilation and I wanted to open a small window, that was the only hope of letting some air circulate. However, the room had recently been painted and the window frame was stuck. I pushed at the frame with as much of my weight as I could bring to bear on the high window. It didn’t budge. Then I tried hitting the window frame with the palm of my hand. Increasingly vigorous efforts were to no avail, so I gave up.
Next, my companion used the bathroom. When she emerged, she said simply, “You do know that the window has no glass in it.”
It was true. I had been pushing and shoving and getting increasingly agitated in my attempts to open a window that was already, in a different way, completely open. I hadn’t really looked to see whether there was glass in the window. Even though it was right in front of me, I had just assumed that there was glass there. It shows just how much of what we “see” in the world is coming from our preconceptions, rather than reality.
Another reason I like this little anecdote is that, for me, it symbolises something about our connection with the divine. We tend to assume that there is something blocking that connection, that we have to struggle to reconnect with the open skies, that there is a window which must be opened before we can breathe. In truth, there is nothing blocking that connection, it is always open to us, it always has been, it always will be.
