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Story -Running Together



Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 09:40:37 -0700
To: All Atlee + Y2K <Y2K@montana.com>
From: Mary Bento <mbento@montana.com>
Subject: Running Together


Hello All!! Hope this day/night is filled with progress and warmth.

I thought this was well worth passing along from a net friend. Reminds me
a lot of the things many of us are doing together in order to meet our
concerns for Y2k --- and I'm sure other things facing us now both
personally and worldly.
Take care for now, Mary B.
******************************************************
>
>Dear mates

>I read recently the story of the Seattle Special Olympics at which 9
>physically and/or mentally disabled youth lined up for the 100yd dash.
>Shortly after the enthusiastic start, one participant fell over several
>times after which he stayed on the ground and cried. The other 8 all
>looked around, stopped and came back to him to help. They encouraged him
>affectionately to rejoin the race. All 9 then linked arms and ran the rest
>of the race together, crossing the finishing line in partnership. The
>onlookers rose and clapped and cheered.
>
>Apart from the sheer joy of the story for me, I realised how sweet an
>analogy and how communicable a concept if it were applied to the human race.
>
>Our future could be one of competition and desire for if not greed for
>glory, OR one where the front runners choose to turn back from their
>pursuits to embrace the lonely, the fallen and sad and help them to enter
>the race once more. This time the race, however, is a jog for the sheer
>fun of it, a run to demonstrate the power of love and compassion over greed
>and dominance.
>
>Is it perhaps time to relegate the artefacts and artifices of human
>creation to a holding room while we embrace the fallen?
>
>This is not a new concept, it is simply that I could understand deeply and
>with a freshness the workings of Awareness when I read of this race. It
>bought me face to face with my own greed - greed for new insights, new
>faces. Maybe it is overtime I heard the sorrow of the world in simple ways
>and responded with simple compassion. Perhaps even the race to know is an
>event to be run for the sheer joy of it and the exhileration of knowing we
>have left no-one fallen on bad times behind us.
>
>It takes the 'small ones' to teach us. I will cherish my feelings from
>this story for a long time. In a way I think it has bought me to a crisis
>in my line of thinking and given me a precious loop-hole to escape the
>crushing vendetta of logical analysis. It seems that mentalisation creates
>a clutter and dissonance, a confusion that creates a need to know more, a
>search for ever more clever answers and a desire to be always thinking.
>
>The eight young runners, howsover the events in their lives bought them to
>that particular day, were free of the vice of mentalisation. In their own
>inimitable way, they contributed more to the downcast and left-behind than
>the sheer glory of running and competing. They knew with one mind,
>undisturbed by a need to conform to or confront forms and rules, that the
>person on the ground was in need of comfort. They rallied instantly to
>succour him, free from the crippling mentalisation of how they might
>disturb the proceedings, of their own desires to win, of how he would
>really be okay cause someone else would help him, that their job was to
>create the illusion that winning is superior to compassion. They allowed
>the spirit of compassion to use their feet to TURN THE WORLD AROUND.

>******************************************************************************

Through Integrity, May the Balance of Heart and Head, Direct the Will of All.

"Onward & Upward"