Exercises in compassion, part 1

A week ago, I attended a weekend-long non-residential retreat at the local State University. The theme was "Love in Turbulent Times"; based on my sense of the practitioners and the attendees, it could probably have been subtitled "How to Preserve Equanimity When the Bad Guys Won the Last Election." The dharma teacher tried valiantly to keep overt political statements out of his talks, but didn't really succeed. I wasn't surprised: I know this town and at least some of the local Buddhist community, so I expected that going in. And mostly it wasn't political, or not very.

He talked about compassion, among other topics, and this is one of the themes I found myself pondering. In particular, I remember when I first read Jack Kornfield's A Path With Heart, Kornfield wrote that one of the ways to test whether your spiritual path is a healthy one is to check whether you have become more open and compassionate with time, or more isolated and hard-hearted? (I discuss this passage in this post from eleven years ago.) So I asked myself: Am I more compassionate than I used to be? And I answered, Partly yes. I think I am more compassionate towards people I know, like Wife or Father. Certainly I get angry at them a lot less. What's less clear is whether I am more compassionate towards strangers, and the dharma teacher seemed to put some emphasis on compassion towards strangers in his talks. (You could probably use this recent post to argue that my compassion for strangers is not high.) On the other hand, I wonder how often "compassion for strangers" counts as real compassion, and how often it is merely performative, in order to make the do-gooder look good? So I've got something to meditate on.

Then the morning of the second day, I was confronted with a concrete exercise in compassion! I got to the university early, and pulled into the parking lot. As I pulled in, I saw one party just walking away. They were elderly, obviously not University people, and obviously attendees of the meditation retreat. So far, so good. But when I got to the parking kiosk, I realized they had walked off without paying. More exactly, they had activated the parking kiosk, and had recorded their license plate number. But they had not actually fed the machine any money! I assume this negligence has to have been caused by confusion or ignorance; if they had intended to park-and-dash, they wouldn't have initiated the process. What should I do?

I thought about it while paying for my own parking, and for too many minutes thereafter. I saw three options:

1. Forget about the problem. In that case, campus parking enforcement would probably give them a ticket.
2. Write down their license number, and then ask around at the retreat "Is this your car? You need to go back and pay for your parking!"
3. Just pay their damned parking myself. (It didn't cost much.)

As I say, I spent way too much time thinking about this. In the end, I just paid for their parking. It seemed the easiest thing to do. (Strictly speaking, I guess it would have been easier to do nothing. But it would have bugged me if they had actually gotten a ticket.)

I do not know whether my decision was influenced by my rumination the previous day on the role of compassion in my life.  

Then the dharma teacher's remarks the second day sent my thoughts down a whole new path! See Part Two for details.