unexpected inspiration

I'm sitting in a hospital cafeteria reading a book right now, and I've been keeping my eye on a mother and her two young children. For a moment there I caught her eye and smiled at her. At first glance, there's nothing really remarkable about this woman or her children.

But having looked over the top of my book a few times, I notice something that completely blows me away: she is completely calm and happy with her children. She's not even smiling, just quietly attentive to them - the girl is perhaps three and the boy is a baby. The mother is not particularly attractive or sexy. Nor does she hold herself with the kind of confidence that usually makes me want to meet someone. It's just that she displays a complete absence of the little edges of fear, anger, and worry that people usually wear like unnoticed crumbs on their face.

The children are peaceful too. The baby doesn't cry, just sits contentedly on her knee looking around. He caught my eye too, and held it for a long time, even after I looked back to my book (The Starfish and the Spider) and glanced up again. The girl stays close but moves back and forth around the table, fiddling with the straps on the stroller and talking to her mother occasionally. There is no power struggle between the daughter and the mother, none of the push and pull in which children so ubiquitously engage with their parents. In fact, I never saw this game so clearly as now that for the first time in my life I see its absence.

After a short while an older woman showed up in a hospital gown, with a gaunt, wrinkled face and a wild mane of red and grey hair. I knew it was the grandmother when I saw that she, too, displayed this beautifully serene countenance as she regarded her daughter and grandchildren.

All of a sudden I could see it: the cycle of peace this family was perpetuating. I have heard the phrase "cycle of violence", when it refers to families this usually means physical and/or mental abuse passing from generation to generation. But now this unexpected counterpoint; I could see three generations of people all with the same ... something on their face. It wasn't radiance, it wasn't confidence, it almost wasn't even calm - though I used that word before - it was something I would most readily call enlightenment, but only because it reminded me of some of the more accomplished meditators I have seen.

Who knows, maybe they all practice Zen (or at least the adults do, and the children just naturally soak up their state of mind). But I would be pretty surprised if the grandmother did, if only because of her age and the relative scarcity of Zen in America during most of her life. The world is of course full of other spiritual practices which can doubtless produce a similar capacity for inner peace - I would be very curious to know what influences have made these people this way.

Who knows? Maybe today's climate of quiet in the family is a fluke. Somehow I doubt it though; they just seemed so familiar with each other (yes, I know they're family, but they went further than I've ever seen with a family), and also so familiar with the state they were in.

I wanted to go over and congratulate the mother at first. But I struggled with the impulse, suddenly worried I would make her self-conscious and would be completely unable to describe what I was seeing (I'm having a hard enough time even now), and that I would ruin it. Probably best to just hang back and let them be.

What I know now is that I've seen it and I now I won't feel ready to have children until I can provide them the same atmosphere of peace and security that this woman provided to hers.