Year of Discovery (Week 23: Metro Station Heros and Renunciation)
I was delighted this last week to have friends from abroad in Paris and for the time to meet new friends driving education innovation in France. Despite my more independent-leaning nature, the impact of COVID has shown me the importance of shared experiences in communities and this last week reinforced that.
Going through my daily routines, working on projects remotely and walking throughout the day has given me a glimpse of daily life in the city, where I’ve felt a familiar feeling of fascination being an ‘outsider’ in a different country, asking questions and staying curious without necessarily needing to take on every problem I experience as my own. And it’s given me a bit more perspective on the ways in which different cultures manifest varying ideologies and values in day-to-day life. I’m incredibly grateful for this time.
This week, I’m sharing reflections of heroes and metro stations, and renunciation.
Heroes and Metro Stations
I’ve become increasingly fascinated with and appreciative of public transportation and in Paris, the metro. Each ride is on time, efficient and creates time for me to dig into my latest read. During my commutes when I look up to track how many stations are left, what strikes me most about Paris’ over 300 metro stations are the names. Since the metro is built underground, the stations are often named after more than one of the streets or crossroads above them, and those streets were named for famous people, historical events or the destination the street reached. The naming of the metro stops shares a glimpse of the city through a present-day perspective of who its historical heroes are.
The naming of stops is a sign of what a city commemorates, much like statues. For example, the stop I live closest to is Jaurès, named after Jean Jaurès, a French socialist leader and antimilitarist assassinated at the start of World War I. He achieved the unification of several factions into a single socialist party, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière. In the centenary year of his assassination, former presidents from all sides of the political spectrum paid tribute to him and claimed he would have supported them. François Hollande declared that “Jaurès, the man of socialism, is today the man of all of France” while in 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy declared that his party was Jaurès’ successor. Each metro stop name encompasses an incredible history that, in my research, has helped me understand modern-day France as it is.
But the naming of metro stations in Paris has also faced controversy. In 2018, only four of the 303 metro stations were named after women even four years after Bustle writer Emma Cueto created a new metro station map of Paris if stations were named after prominent women in history. Feminists today have continued to push for more gender parity with the metro station names, saying that métro is an example of how France continues to ignore the role of women in its history.
If on-screen reprentation matters and there is power in repeated words, then the signs of ‘immortilization’ that we see everyday through the naming of cities, roads, metro stations also tell us about who the world today values and deems as success. And more importantly, these signs tell us if any parts of our identity has a chance of being accepted and seen one day by the broader society. Names impact us even if we don’t consciously engage with them everyday and it’s important we continue to be intentional about what the world around us represents.
I’d love to hear from you:
- When you slow down to look at the road or public transportation names around you, what do their ‘immortalized’ names represent to you? Does it mirror a world that you value?
- If you were to name the roads or metro stops of your city, what would you name them after? What does that say about you?
Renunciation
This past Sunday, I attended a Buddhist dharma talk where the monk spoke about renunciation. He shared how often people feared or misinterpreted renunciation in Buddhism, believing that it means to give up all worldly possessions. In religions like Jainism and Hinduism, renunciation often indicates an abandonment of the pursuit of material comforts, in the interests of achieving spiritual enlightenment.
In fact, renunciation in Buddhism is not a wish to abandon family, friends, home, work, and so forth; rather, it is a mind that functions to stop attachment to worldly pleasures and that seeks liberation from contaminated rebirth. It’s a mind that fosters non-attachment or the opposite of attachment (uncontrolled desire). It’s a mind that understands and doesn’t allow self-grasping ignorance to dominate. It’s a mind that understands the true nature of emptiness. It’s a mind that seeks peace and enlightenment and has gained the wisdom of how it needs to change to achieve that.
Buddhist Monk Pema Chodron poetically explains renunciation:
The river flows rapidly down the mountain, and then all of a sudden it gets blocked with big boulders and a lot of trees. The water can’t go any further, even though it has tremendous force and forward energy. It just gets blocked there. That’s what happens with us, too; we get blocked like that. Letting go at the end of the out-breath, letting the thoughts go, is like moving one of those boulders away so that the water can keep flowing, so that our energy and our life force can keep evolving and going forward. We don’t, out of fear of the unknown, have to put up these blocks, these dams, that basically say no to life and to feeling life.
So renunciation is seeing clearly how we hold back, how we pull away, how we shut down, how we close off, and then learning how to open. It’s about saying yes to whatever is put on your plate, whatever knocks on your door, whatever calls you up on your telephone. How we actually do that has to do with coming up against our edge, which is actually the moment when we learn what renunciation means.
Chodron describes the edge as a moment that happens when we are climbing our steep metaphorical mountains. We look over the edge and freeze because we look down and see how far it is — the fear is so great that we can’t move beyond it. Chodron goes on to say, “Life is a whole journey of meeting your edge again and again. That’s where you’re challenged; that’s where, if you’re a person who wants to live, you start to ask yourself questions like, ‘Now, why am I so scared? What is it that I don’t want to see? Why can’t I go any further than this?’”
Renunciation is developed through formal meditation (lamrin practice) on contemplations like karma and practice in daily life through observing our minds. When we experience suffering because of a deluded mind, the trick is to ask ourselves: where does this negative experience or feeling really come from — outside or inside myself? In a situation where someone criticizes me, would I still be suffering if I have a peaceful mind? The real cause of suffering is in my own mind and in knowing that, a negative reaction often is not necessary and is unwise.
For me, renunciation is a practice of observing my daily mind, meditating and contemplating on my deluded mind and how to create a peaceful mind and continuing to deepen my knowledge through experience.
I’d love to hear from you: What are ways in which you deepen your knowledge of and sustain spiritual peace throughout your days?
What I’m reading now: How Proust Can Change Your Life
