In India, the Love Shines Forth

What I noticed in India more than anything was the love that radiated.

Of course, people are people, yet I suspect that the culture of India allows for people to be more right brain than in the U.S., which seems to be more left brain. India was more heart than mind. Just what God talks about in Heavenletters™.

I remember I saw a young couple pushing a hand-cart down the middle of a main street in New Delhi. Lots of traffic, cars, bicycles, and hand-carts. Presumably this cart and whatever its contents were all the couple owned, that and the clothes on their back, yet this couple held hands as they pushed their cart, and their eyes met each other's with love.

Here's another example of love shining forth, but first let me give you a little background. In U.S., pretty much everyone commutes to work every day. In India, people often live where they work and sleep on the floor, or, in the instance I tell about below, on the side of the road.

I saw a man who paved the streets. Accompanying him were his wife and three young children. They slept on the side of the road wherever they were when the day's paving was done. The paving was done by hand, of course.

One night the couple slept by the road in front of the guest house where I was staying. In the morning, the wife came to the guest house to ask for water, and, of course, it was graciously given to her. The wife lit a little fire by the side of the road and made chapatis for her family, and she made them with great love. I bet they were delicious.

The lives in India seemed so simple and easy. The people did not view their lives as hardship or deprivation the way we might see them. I had the sense that they enjoyed life more than we do in U.S. and that, if they were to state their philosophy of life, it would be: Life is good.

I have a short example of life in the U.S. that in some way paralleled the life in India. It was when my daughter had emergency surgery at the University of Iowa Hospital many years ago. It was okay for relatives to sleep on the floor of the waiting rooms on each ward. The staff gave us pillows and blankets. We went to sleep in our clothes, and we got up in our clothes. It was so easy.

Life was more real as it was in India. We slept next to people we didn't know, and we got to know each other beyond the surface. We knew we were simple human beings, and we shared our basic humanness. If we had met waiting in line in a restaurant, for example, we would have never gotten to know each other so deeply, and we wouldn't have cared about each other so much.

I especially remember a young husband and father of young children whose wife was very ill. He took me to the room where his wife was sleeping. "This is my wife," he said,  in shock and disbelief that his beautiful wife was lying in a hospital bed when days before they were laughing at home. This dear young man, whose name I don't remember -- he and I shared a moment of aching sweetness and pain and love. We shared a closeness that I have not shared with people I have known for years and years.

That's sort of how it was in India, the real thing.