In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Overcoats & the Third Side

At my house we like to play with words. Living with a linguist will do that. Life is funner when you live with a punner. (Ugh - did I just say that!?)

Anyway ... yesterday writing about my dog's "undercoat" got me thinking about its opposite, and the editor/joker in me thinks I should have called my "primary coat" my "topcoat" or my "overcoat."

Then the word "overcoat" reminded me of a story I read in a great book called After Long Silence by Helen Fremont, which Amazon.com introduces like this:

"In her mid-30s Helen Fremont discovered that, although she had been raised in the Midwest as a Catholic, she was in fact the daughter of Polish Jews whose families had been exterminated in the Holocaust. Fremont's tender but unsparing memoir chronicles the voyage of discovery she took with her older sister, ferreting out information from Jewish organizations and individuals and worrying about its impact on their angry, overpowering father and reticent, nightmare-plagued mother."

In a chapter about her family's life in the Jewish ghetto of Lvov, Poland, she describes the resourcefulness required to live under those harsh conditions and the discovery of the magic third side:

"Despite her acrobatics, however, the family barely survived, bartering their clothing for food, until they had almost nothing left. 'We each had only one overcoat,' my mother told me, 'which we wore day in and day out for years. The material began to wear out, so eventually we turned the coats inside out and wore them with the inner fabric exposed. But after a while even this fabric was completely worn out; we were reduced to rags. And then -- you know what happened? We discovered the third side. It was like magic! We turned the coat inside out again, and found that the third side was really quite new by comparison!' "

It's a story about imputation, don't you think? What started out as first side became second side (or underside) and then became first side - outside - again. 

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