Yesterday, while driving, a most unusual-looking car came past in the oncoming lane. It wasn’t a strange make or model – just an early nineties burgundy four-door. The unusual thing is that on its hood there was a huge dent. And over that dent, in white tape, was the body outline of a deer.
I didn’t get to meet the person, but one could imagine that a very certain type of humor had to be present in order to tape that deer outline on the hood. After all, hitting a deer is not usually a pleasant experience. If we’re animal lovers, it is tragic because we’ve killed a wild creature. If we’re concerned with finances, we can get upset about the damages to our car. And such an event can also pull us from our comfortable complacency, and remind us that at any moment, something can ‘jump out’ at us in life and disrupt our everyday routine.
For many of us, we’ll be affected by all of these concerns.
This is how we usually wade through life. Moving along in a straight line, all our energies focused on making everything as predictable as possible. Usually life grants us this, and soon we’re lulled into thinking that everything is going to be just fine. And then, BAM! Something happens, and we can get pretty upset, because it’s easy to forget that people die or get sick, and the stockmarket crashes, and deer jump out and kill themselves on the hoods of our cars.
In this way, all the symbols of ‘the good life’ we’ve created for ourselves can get in the way, because we’re no longer able to encounter each moment as it is – we only accept it if it fits into our symbolic idea of ‘good’.
There’s another way of looking at life.
That car with the deer outline can be a bodhisattva to everyone reading this – pointing us toward a way of encountering each present moment of life just as it appears. The car is a good teacher because it shows us that our symbols can be used to point toward something besides the usual ‘woe is me’ version of reality we all adhere to.
What will our reaction be to the ‘bad’ things of life? Will we resist as best we can, screaming and kicking the whole while? Or is there another way to encounter the ‘negatives’ of life – a way in which they cease to become negative at all?
