Fatherhood: Year One

It’s seventeen months since I became a father but it’s taken me this long to get my head together enough to write about it, so here goes …..

When I set out to have a baby I had no idea that there was an international conspiracy of parents who are all sworn to uphold the terrible secrets of parenthood. Once sworn in we are duty bound to pretend that all is rosy, make a few anecdotes about lack of sleep and say how wonderful our children are lest we put the continued viability of the human race in jeopardy by telling the awful truth.

I have however decided to break this silence and I think the best way to do it is to tell my own tale. Unlike the few vacuous books concerning fatherhood in bookshops (there’s usually about two stuck in the back somewhere amidst the 50,000 books on motherhood) I want to try and detail the internal processes that went on in my mind as fatherhood unfolded rather than just recount some tale like a story told down the pub couched in football analogies and bravado. This is what the few books I read attempted to do and they were useless to me especially given that I know nothing about football and comparing things to the offside rule just bewildered me even further.

So to kick off (damn thats a football reference isn’t it) I thought I ‘d go right back to the beginning ….

Milk, Cheese and the Second Precept

I’d like to talk about the consumption of dairy products mainly in relation to the 2nd Buddhist Precept: “Do not take what is not given”.

Many students of Buddhism are vegetarians, and for those that are not I wouldn’t even know where to begin debating with them as the logical inconsistency between eating meat and the 1st Precept concerning not killing is so glaringly obvious I can’t understand how anyone could not see it.

But many do consume milk and cheese and I’m not talking about those in resource starved, agriculturally poor, or famine ridden areas of the world, I talking about westerners in first world countries. These people think milk and cheese is okay, but I’d like to show how they violate not just the 2nd precept concerning stealing but also the first concerning killing.

Now of course I’m the first to say that the precepts are not dogma and its up to everyone to interpret them themselves and deepen their own understanding of them as they go on, but for what its worth here’s my understanding.

Not A Buddhist

The other day someone asked me if I was a Buddhist after I mentioned something about meditation. The answer was no and here’s why:

What is Buddhism? Well it depends on who you ask but for me it breaks down like this.

A few thousand years ago this guy Siddartha looks at the world around him and comes up with some good ideas, teachings, and practices to help him and others live in the world.

Some of his ideas were quite socially radical in terms of his rejection of the Hindu caste system for instance. His “religious” ideas were also quite unorthodox in that he wasn’t really concerned with deities, he didn’t deny their existence, he just thought they were irrelevant to his model of spirituality.

In a way you could say his ideas were one of the first post modern systems of thought, more akin to a school of philosophy or modern psychology than a religion. It wasn’t a set of revealed truths or dogma more a DIY guide to exploring the nature of your own existence. Any rules associated with it were not laws to be blindly obeyed but suggested guidelines for living that he found useful if you wanted try and put some of his ideas into practise.

Does Meditation Work

Assessing whether meditation works is really dependent on what you expect it to work at! For me I started daily meditation practise at a time when I found myself in a bit of a rut and felt my life wasn’t actually moving forward. The only way I was trying to break out of this rut was by indulging my desires and becoming more and more self-involved. This seemed to be getting me nowhere and was turning me into someone I really didn’t like.

It was at this point that I chanced upon a buddhist article about the nature of desire and it really hit home to me. So I set out to learn some more about this and rather than being all intellectual about it I thought i’d just start meditating first and see what happened. So I suppose for me I wanted meditation to work at making me into someone who was happier with their life and happier about who they were.