The Only Change You Need Is the Change From Within

📓1 May 2023

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise so I am changing myself."– Rumi.

Talking about how my innocent youth was so naive, believing that what I know would make things better, would make things better.

Thinking I could voice my opinion and that people would listen because it really was such a good idea (for me).

I love my younger self. Her heart is pure, but unfortunately in this reality it's known as naivety.

I read this and look inside myself with kindness but radical honesty.

How much time and life energy spent in an attempt to convince people—and for what?

Validation? Recognition? Approval of some kind. Just wanted to be right, all the time. I thought, "Can you please, just for once, let yourself be wrong and bad. Be fooled, and unknown?"

When I came back home after almost two months away, the dog I usually saw had just given birth to a litter of four or five puppies. Literally, on the street. They don't seem to have a home. She grew famished; her ribcage shows. She was in much better shape when I left; she didn't seem to be pregnant either.

I felt the melancholia sea rise.

I didn't want to go out to walk my dogs and see these suffering scenes around here. But avoiding isn't my style. I collide.

One evening, as I stood staring at the litter, contemplating the rising thoughts and sensations in my body, I met the mother dog who came by asking for food as usual. A starved ribcage on thin legs, carrying the impossible weight of full, swollen breasts that hung like sagging fruit from a dying branch. I worried. Thoughts flooded: should I interfere? What did I learn last time about rescuing Bekki? What am I trying to save here? Who is a savior when both are in despair?

I left them there thinking, why dwell on the suffering of dogs when all beings are in this suffering together?

What about humanity and other forms of life? Poverty I see everywhere in Bali, famished war refugees in countless camps, undernourished people facing daily hunger in Africa, wildfires that kill millions of lives—why dwell on dogs?

The essence of life is life itself. Not its form, not its meaning, not its label. The very existence of life has no other meaning other than life. Just life. Not the life of a dog, the life of a child, the life of my son, the life of the butterfly, the life of a tree, or the life of me. It is all equal.

A consciousness in this mass of bubbles, an immortal vessel that deteriorates through time. It is ephemeral, has no form, and no meaning. I have an understanding of this both at the intellectual and experiential level, and yet, still fall through the crack of the unconscious ego.

I need to be conscious of this attachment. And it needs to be let go.

I need to save myself first.

Up the Taman Giri hill heading for home, a tiny being with a baby sling rag wrapped to her chest approached me. Tiny legs dangling as the mom paced down the hill carrying groceries in both hands, her lips parted as she passed me with the most fulfilling image of the day.

The biggest smile, and a sparkling reflection of a sunset in her eyes.

I was saved—by a young, skinny, possibly hungry mom and her child that I felt sorry for two seconds ago.

They saved me. Not the other way round.

And in that moment, something changed in me.