Is the World Working Against You?

One afternoon, while working in the back garden, I noticed a small wild bird had flown in through an open door and become trapped inside the house. Birds do not belong indoors, and I went in straightaway to set it free.

Whatever room I entered, I opened the windows wide. But each window made its small rattling sound, and the bird, terrified by it, fled into the next room ahead of me. I followed gently, speaking softly, closing doors behind me — and still, in its eyes, I was a giant whose only intention was harm.

Eventually, finding a single open window, the bird escaped. Just before it disappeared, it gave me one last frightened look, as if to say: I survived your cruelty.

An unfamiliar mirror

Sitting at the kitchen table afterward, the obvious comparison arrived. I am the bird. Some larger, gentler intelligence is constantly trying to help me toward the open window — and I, in my smaller view, mostly read its arrangements as misfortune, as injustice, as proof that the world is against me.

The Srimad-Bhagavatam suggests that this misreading is itself the trouble. Whatever appears in our lives is, in some final sense, meant for our good — a kind of cosmic sensitivity training, fitted to us with care. To live as if this were true is not to deny pain. It is only to relax, a little, the long-held suspicion that life is an ambush — and to begin, slowly, to feel grateful even for the difficult hours.

Adapted from a reflection by Vaisesika Dasa.