Individual and Society Creative

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He told me about his experience as a 10 year old on a holiday in a Sri Lankan monastery. He saw a boy the same age, height and shape as him in red robes to live as a monk. The boy sat learning the Buddhist way, free from technology and the vain pleasures of humanity. However 10 year old Buddha, holding his Gameboy trying to defeat the Elite 4 in Pokémon while nagging at his mom to see how much longer they needed to stay at the monastery, stood next to the boy, who was fixing his rubber slippers in his hand, for a picture. Buddha once was sad for the boy, who lived in a world without material luxuries. Now the Buddha is sad for his own childhood and happy for the boy.

“Happy? How can you be happy for the monk boy?”

He says that it a question of suffering. That in his own childhood he valued entertainment through technological stimulation over human connection and experienced an emotional suffering as a result, whereas the boy’s childhood society is one where values of tolerance and kindness are fundamental allowing for an absence of suffering in his life.

He says that I am psychologically suffering in my legal studies. He asks me:

“Why?”

The sky is clear blue and he is no longer a Buddha but an ethnic man in a loose white tunic, with long black hair and a worried expression. I tell him my vision of living in a mansion with a beautiful wife and lots of money. I tell him that I need take physical and psychological risks to be the rich in our society.

The Ethnic man after pursing his lips for a moment says to me, “ You are right, yet the life you wish for is hollow at the core. This Capitalist system is fundamentally flawed if our youth find meaning in attaining money and material. Especially when our youth are willing to be walking corpses for this. If meaning is measured by wealth, then you can look to yourself to see the true suffering this irrational desire brings. True meaning is being free from suffering.”

I walk back to Harvey. Hugging his knees, rocking back and forth, he is still in a trance. A brownie lay beside him whispering into my ear. A single sheet of law paper was keeping the brownie from touching the grass on the cliff. Spectating at the ocean below me, I see the water dancing from the bottom of the cliff, all the way to the horizon. I smile at the thought of living life with possibility, with choice, with liberation. I begin to realise that I do not desire money.

I desire to survive.

I need money.

I crouch down next to the rocking ball of flesh, and reading the Law documents, peppered with black crumbs, I nibble on another brownie. Looking to the mutilated kaleidoscope skies, I say to myself:

Befriend death today. Live tomorrow.

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