I received such a gift when I was speaking on the phone last week with a dear friend. He asked me if I was familiar with the work of Byron Katie.  I said I was, and that I have engaged in what she calls ‘The Work,’ her particular form of inquiry.

“Well,” he said, “I enjoy listening to her very much, but there’s one thing she keeps saying that I just can’t go along with. It does make sense when I listen to her interacting with people. But afterwards I really wonder about it.”
“About what?” I asked him.
“It’s when she says that reality is always benevolent,” he said.
“Oh yes, “ I said. “I’ve heard her say, ‘In the face of everything that appears to be real, only kindness remains.’”
“I understand,” replied my friend, “ that to say things are bad is just the mind making up a story about what is. But it also seems like a story to say that life is kind. Let’s face it, life can be very cruel sometimes.”

I realized in that moment what a big question that is : Is Reality kind?
Is the Universe benevolent? Some people might think it ridiculous to try and answer such a question, or that we should leave such questions to the philosophers. The truth is, we are all philosophers, and many of us have experienced the answers to these deep questions emerging out of our whole experience of life. Sometimes we’re not conscious of what we assume or believe about life, but our answers to such questions affect every aspect of how we live and experience the world.

I watched this week, as this question from my friend came alive in me, crawled deep into my heart, and would not let me alone.

I remember when I first came back from India. I was in a state of deep trauma-feeling bewildered, betrayed and shattered. I discovered the Diamond Heart Teachings of A.H. Almaas at that time, and heard him speak with great eloquence about the benevolence of life, the inherent goodness of the vast intelligence that moves in us and through us. This was a wild thing for me to contemplate at that time. I was not on friendly terms with the Universe!

The moment all of that turned around was one evening at my daughter’s house in Nelson. I was sitting at the kitchen table, feeling crushed by life and quite sorry for myself. She came into the kitchen, and put a ‘People’ magazine down on the table. “There’s something in here I’d like you to read,” she said, so I did.

It was a story about a woman called Robin Tovey. Robin is a woman in her late 30’s, who lives in an apartment in Toronto, and has quite a good job, working for a firm downtown. She also has a life partner. All of this seemed very unremarkable to me until I found out one thing about Robin Tovey: she was born without arms and legs.

As I read the story, the details of her life unfolded. There were pictures of her when she was a child. One of them really got to me: Robin and her family at the beach. The other children are running and playing in the waves; and there is Robin, just sitting on the sand. No arms, no legs, wind blowing in her hair, and an ecstatic look on her face. A picture of radiant joy.

The article described what Robin has to do when she eats. She puts the fork in her mouth, using these sticks she has, picks up the food with the fork, and then somehow flips it into her mouth. I tried it right then and there, and ended up with tears running down my face, undone by the enormity of the challenges she deals with every day of her life.

When her parents were asked, “What did you do, that Robin turned out like this?” they replied, “We never cut her any slack. We treated her as an equal member of our family. We never saw her as a victim.”

That was when I really began to entertain the possibility that perhaps, when we let go of our conditioned responses, we’ll find out that life is deeply, profoundly kind- kind beyond all of our conventional notions of good and bad.

Something has become clear to me since then: in every single moment, life offers each one of us the possibility of awakening to who we really are, to our true nature.  No matter what happens, no matter how bad or how good it seems to be, that invitation is always there. No matter what we do, no matter what we think, that invitation and that possibility never go away.  What could be kinder than that?