For him it was a river of doom. Not for me. For me it was a long driveway to a small trailer up on a hill where his mom lived. There were two places he would be. The other one had already been checked.

It was a long driveway.  We just rolled in slow about halfway up, lights out, and stopped under a huge poplar. Shut the engine and listened. Watched the lights in the trailer. Watched the shadows and grass. Opened the doors and stepped out into the evening air.

If this was where he came to it would have looked different to him than it ever looked before. It wasn’t a homecoming this time. It was goodbye.

We stayed still in the shadow of the tree and we watched and listened. Crickets.

Years ago I spent a few weeks in the desert, shooting all day every day. Every environment, dark and light, buildings and fields, roads and rooftops, smoke and strobes, a hundred scenarios, searching, running, waiting, hunting, driving. You could feel your skills really peaking by the end of the school. The lead instructor thanked us and commended us. Then he said but you know sometimes there’s a sniper on the roof and it’s not your lucky day. 

I watched the roof.

There are special ways to knock on the door of a trailer at a time like this, because it’s easy to shoot through the walls from inside.

The door opened. It was mom. Her face tightened up when she saw it was us but she was pleasant and polite and invited us in. We asked if her son was there. She said no, she hadn’t seen him. Her hands were pressed together and she looked tense like she’d been through this before. Beneath her feet her grandson played, zooming his fire truck around under the kitchen table. He looked up at us, made sure we were looking at him, turned the little red light on top of the fire truck on, and zoomed his truck a little faster than before.

On the TV and on our radios there was news of people screaming at each other. Making demands, threats, and accusations. They were grimacing, mocking, sneering and clubbing each other for money and delight. Or sitting at home or sitting in traffic wondering what it was all about.

People like us drove through this maze of ugliness and greed every night and marked off the pools of blood and pieces of evidence, photographed the wounds, listed the missing items, interviewed the victims, found the witnesses, and identified the suspects who we held until they were released.

Thugs and bands of thugs attacked innocent people who were mystified and nauseated by their unexpected misfortune. They could hardly believe it was really happening to them even when the punches sent them reeling and the found themselves suddenly lying on the dirty ground. But, except in scale, how much different was it from the exploits of some of the so called great conquerors of history who swept across continents, rode from town to peaceful town, and killed and smashed and stole and laughed at the misery of their victims, victims who wondered what madness, what cruelty, would drive people who lacked nothing, to do such evil to them.

Stopping that is why we have a military and stopping thugs from preying on the innocent is why we have the cops.

But grandmom saw us differently. She saw us as people who could set her son free. Because, she explained, he was a good boy. He really was, she said.

He really wasn’t, from what we knew. We saw him on video at a convenience store being not good at all.

She thought back about how he used to be when he was the age of the little grandson under the table and what he liked, what foods and what toys, and what he talked about to her sometimes, not so long ago. She told us about him as if it was our decision, as if, if she could just get us to see him as she did, that we would understand, that we would just disappear back into the evening and the setting sun, leaving no trace, leaving everything like it used to be. The dust would settle on the driveway as we drove away, leaving her and her family in peace.

She was about 5 seconds into her story. We asked if we could just take a look around to be sure he wasn’t there.

When we heard footsteps on the porch we had only a second to turn to the door. It snapped opened and the doorway filled with a big fat red faced guy who was breathing hard. It was the uncle of the guy we were looking for.

He looked like he told himself he was a big man but he moved like a cat; like he told himself he looked strong and tough. He looked irritated and unhappy and uncomfortable and his face was contracted like he was at the end of his rope, like he was about to have a stroke. He shouted “Get out! “

“Sir, we are looking for…”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“An arrest warrant was issued…”

“No search warrant?” His eyes showed satisfaction in playing what he believed was his trump card. “Get out!...”

He said it as a threat, and he stood in the one narrow doorway, blocking our way.  This kind of intimidation must have worked for him in the past, as he seemed accustomed to using it.

The little grandson hugged his fire truck and hid behind his granny, as far back as he could get. She looked down and froze.

Someone out there somewhere keyed a mic and we heard on our radios that the suspect we were looking for was spotted hiding in a field; the radios just barely audible while this guy was shouting.

He screamed at us and blocked the door. He let loose with a stream of hate that would blister your skin if you would be a target for it. I wasn’t. It blew by. But he went for it. Hated cops and hated all the people who tried to push him around…

I don’t know who he was talking to but it wasn’t me. It wasn’t my partner either. He didn’t see us like we saw ourselves. He didn’t know a thing about either of us. He didn’t see us like the woman or the little boy saw us. Or like our co-workers, friends, family or anybody who knew us saw us. Not that they’d all agree either. But still…

The radio updated the status of the search of the field down the road.  

We were done here. I communicated to Mr. Big that he needed to move out of our way and he did.

Everyone has their own impression of who it is they are speaking to: some of that impression comes from their own imagination and some of it comes from out there in the world in front of them.

People speak to each other as if they know each other but they often get it wrong. It’s no different for cops than it is for anyone else. Some assume we are heroes, some think we are villains, some see blue collar, some see buddies, some see rednecks, some see crooks, some think we are professionals, gunfighters and race car drivers, some think we are over worked and underpaid, and some think we hang out all day.  You run into any or all of that every day and it changes from moment to moment. It takes some time to learn to spot who it is the person you are speaking to thinks they are speaking to. And that is a useful skill to have.

I knew a man who lived not far from here who came here from Tibet. There he had a large house and livestock. Here he rented a little room and worked bagging groceries at the supermarket. He would smile to each customer and gently and thoughtfully pack up their groceries in their bags.

Over the years his gentle smile faded. Under the harsh lights of the store, the repetition, the dullness of the work, the cold responses he got from the people he shepherded through his line, people who thought this kindness was an embarrassment or an intrusion or unsophisticated or simple minded, his gentleness and warmth disappeared. After a few years he looked as flat and businesslike as everyone else in his line. It was a sad sight to me. But little by little, after a while, his small polite smile returned.

Where he came from most of the people were poor. There was a lot of open land there. And you were always in the presence of the magnificent sky. He had learned how to be happy. Literally, there is a way to do it. Other people cannot make you happy. But you can do it. Through acting kindly. Through taking rudeness or even harsh treatment as an opportunity not to bust a cap in someone’s head, but to develop patience and equanimity – useful in facing the difficulties of life and death, and essential as a foundation for deeper practice.

What a wonderful opportunity he had at the supermarket to practice this, he decided. But not so many people appreciated what he was doing. He did not have a village or countryside full of people who understood the difficulty of what he was attempting and who admired the effort.

If you live in Manitoba it goes without saying that Canadians support and admire hockey. In the same way Tibetans support and admire Buddhist practitioners. While not every Canadian grows up to play pro hockey a lot of them get very good. And for many Tibetans the training and support they get in the art of happiness, the art of being a true human being, shows in their manner and in the results of their practice.

I wondered how that guy in the doorway found himself so angry, sad and separate from the world. What was the path? His wife wouldn’t speak in his presence, his grandson was terrified of him, his son was out threatening strangers in stores with murder for small change, he had a dozen disputes with his neighbors on the road over the years, and now the whole world around him seem to be arrayed against him and, he felt, they were closing in for the kill.

The wind stirred the leaves of the poplar tree and the crickets picked up steam. Out in the field half a mile from where we were we could see flashes of light in the corn. We quickly headed that way.

How did the transplanted Tibetan manage years of tender kindness to cold faced strangers? What drained it, and how did he manage to recover? Not by camping out in a public park, taunting the cops and demanding that strangers support him. Not by envying the wealthy or manipulating the resentment of the dependent or the poor, or forcing others by threats or intimidation to submit to his will. Not by assuming that happiness could be conferred upon him by someone else.

I can tell you the life paths of this Tibetan clerk and the uncle in the doorway began before they came into the world. We can assume that feeling distinct from the rest of the world is our mental habit from the beginning of time.

That separation happens in this life according to a common pattern that both of these men, and you and I, followed. But we build on our emergence as a separate person in very different ways, as we move through life.

The process starts as the infant recognizes that it is not the same as its mother. It felt like it was the same as its mother at one time, but instantly, after the physical separation, the infant has feelings of pleasant- or unpleasantness. Then it recognizes liked and disliked objects. Then it has spontaneous responses to those objects – it likes some and dislikes others – and it responds to those feelings with physical actions and vocalizations. At that point the infant, everyone at the start, including the checkout guy and the doorway guy, then senses that likes may be provided and dislikes may be withdrawn in connection with those actions. In other words mom will respond one way to crying and another way to smiling. And her behavior will teach the infant to use willed actions, not just spontaneous responses, to get her to provide what it likes and remove what it dislikes. Pretty soon the infant will learn to use willed vocalizations to symbolize and express desires: that is, the infant will learn to speak.

The sequence of the recognition of the distinction between self and other, that is the production of the unconscious mental habit of a belief in independent existence of objects and subjects, begins with the recognition of separate form or ontological identity (being physically and personally distinct from mom), proceeds to the recognition of separate knowledge set or epistemological identity (knowing and feeling things mom does not know), and continues to labeling, that is, a separate linguistic identity (I can reach across the gulf of separation between myself and others by using language.)

 This labeling causes a bridge to form, at first between mother and child and then between one’s self and other people, constructed from expressive language. This development begins as an attempt to close the epistemological gap by informing the mother about the infant’s affective state. This is how the recognition of self and other forms. Then as we get older we differentiate more completely, creating a rich identity filled with special characteristics and boundaries.

Then we either reinforce the separation or reach across the gulf and connect with others. That depends on training.

For immature people, when language and gestures fail to bring happiness in from the outside world, the result is frustration, anger, and separation.

People who develop in a healthy way learn the methods by which we can mature and become happy.  We can recognize the impermanence of things – our feelings, our sensations, our relationships – and by understanding impermanence and the mental disturbance that comes from attempting to attach our happiness to impermanent things, by understanding that in fact happiness comes from taking care of others, we can recognize that we are not separate after all.

Instead of making demands on the world we take care of it. Then we can proceed.

Unlike an infant, we need not be occupied by trying to get the world to serve us.  We need not be preoccupied by trying to recover the sensation of the human womb from which we emerged.

Instead we are moved to reunion with what is called “the womb of Buddhas,” that is acquiring the understanding of prajna paramita or transcendent wisdom, from which we are really never separated, with which we are reunited, and as which we exist throughout all space and time.

That makes you happy. And it makes the people around you happy. Reinforcing the habit of isolation makes you unhappy and leads to death.

Crickets may feel flickers of happiness from moment to moment. I can't tell. But they and other animals do not have the power to learn how to complete the path to happiness. People do.

All we need to do is have a chance to learn what to do and then do it. You don’t have to be a shepherd or a saint to do this. You can stay in a small house with your family and do it.