In thinking about the preliminaries and the message reflected in the teachings, I have come to realize how presumptuous I have been about my impact on people or circumstances.

Human life is precious.

The more I am made aware of it, the more heartbreaking it is to hear about all the vicious killings of people all over the world. I watched Waltz with Bashir twice in the last two days, both times feeling overwhelming distress about the Shabra and Shatila massacre. Even as I think about all the indoctrinated young soldiers fighting the war on both sides, kids holding guns, women and older people walking towards their end, I am enraged, disturbed, and driven to tears. What am I to do with this knowledge that life is precious? I could grieve for the people who don’t have the luxury of reflecting on life and death, or be grateful for my own life even as I feel sorry for those who are not as fortunate. What beyond that?

Death comes to everyone.

Here again, I can’t help but wonder about people to whom death comes so brutally. Should I then come to terms with the fact that death comes to everyone or focus on the unfairness with which it comes to many! I speak not just of war, but of poverty, of sickness.

What goes around comes around.

Does it really? Do my actions have consequences? Can I act in a way as to promote peace and hope that it will have made an impact? Or am I being bigheaded about my role in this world? At the moment, I feel very small and insignificant. That being said, WAR seems to go around and come around a lot. The same tragic chain of events repeating themselves in cycles, where each side takes revenge on the other, or the same side repeatedly attacks the other with a temporary suspension of hostility, during which time adversaries in some other part of the world decide to go into battle!

Contemplate that as long as you are too focused on self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will suffer. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want does not result in happiness.

I am going to think about this a little more. I am hoping that spending some more time contemplating on this teaching will make the light go off in my head and make me less cynical.

In the mean time, I received an email today from a friend with Kevin Carter's 1994 picture of the young emaciated Sudanese girl crawling to the feeding center as a vulture sits behind her waiting for her to die. What am I to do with it?