It was Easy to Keep Clean .... Considered with the Passage of Time

It is written someplace or other that time reveals all to all who have the patience to wait for its passage. But sometimes the pain is too great, sometimes the need to find out Why is so strong that one has to push at life and find the answers more quickly. Some of us are content to wait, and some of us are not.

During the mid 1930's, MAHATMA GANDHI was travelling through India, campaigning for the freedom of INDIA from the British Raj. He had been jailed a decade before by the British, and when he came out of prison in 1933, he brought with him a single broken spoon and bowl. He ate, washed, and basically did everything out of this one set of utensils. Someone in his following noticed that he was doing so and felt that there was great meaning behind what he was doing, and so they began to do so also. This cult grew and grew, and the philosophy of the "ONE BOWLNESS OF LIFE "developed. Now the key here was that no-one had asked Gandhi why he did so. No-one had taken the time to come to the understanding of the Why's and the Where to For’s of his practice. One day, it was reported, one brave soul finally asked why Gandhi was living so to speak from one bowl. Now you have to understand that the group had grown over a period of six or so months to encompass several thousand persons. Gandhi replied to the young student that "It was Easy to Keep Clean".

Nothing great, nothing deep, just a very simple practice that made life easier and straight forward; we tend to over complicate our lives just for the sake of the *supposed* understanding of it. It just muddles and muddies the waters even more, the more we think about, and it has been found that if you set your mind hard enough to work on a problem it will always get an answer, "not necessarily" the appropriate one, but an answer none-the-less, just as that small group in India did when they tried to understand what Gandhi was doing when all they had to do was ask.

It supposedly allows the so called secrets of life to percolate to the surface, to be examined and adapted into the day to "terrible dailyness" of life and its' passage.


NDT: from unpublished work from 1998 ...