A Table I Did Not Set

Recently, a dear friend Tony and his partner invited me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant with some friends of theirs. “Hitendra, don’t worry, we know the owner,” Tony reassured me. “They’ve promised to cook you some great vegetarian dishes.” I told him I’d be happy to join them.

There we were at the restaurant, everyone in bubbly spirits. Others ordered their entrees from the menu, the chef came out to share what vegetarian dishes he’d prepare for me, and the evening began to unfold with all its usual warmth. It promised to be a beautiful gathering.

A few minutes in, the servers approached our table with great fanfare, carrying an enormous king crab. They were presenting it to us before whisking it away to the kitchen to be cooked.

“Would you like to hold it?” a server asked. Two of the guests rose eagerly to do so. Cameras flashed. Laughter rippled across the table.

And then, the server turned to me. “Would you like to hold it, too?”

Hold the crab? I could hardly bear to look at it! The last time I had eaten seafood was when I was nine or ten. Please, I thought to myself, take it away!

It had never been my plan to tell them not to cook it for the dinner gathering. I had long ago decided that was not going to be my stance in the world. As a boy, I would make passionate appeals to my father to give up eating meat and seafood, because I found it so uncomfortable that we would take the life of a poor fish or chicken or goat just for our eating pleasure. Then one day, I learned in middle school that plants, too, have life. That was a very clarifying moment for me. I decided I wasn’t going to stop eating plants, and yet, I wasn’t going to start eating meat or seafood either.

Some values you and I possess will be our public values, values we choose to follow and advance in the world. Seeking to approach every moment from an inspired place is one such value for me. I want to practice this for myself, and I want to help others seek inspiration in their lives.  But there is another category of values we may follow: our private values, where we do not actively seek to convert others to our way of being or thinking.

Being a vegetarian is a private value for me. Over the course of my life, I’ve met many beautiful souls who are meat-eaters. Equally, I’ve met some small-hearted vegetarians. Advancing vegetarianism isn’t on my social-change agenda, though I am always happy when someone chooses to be one. 

I was about to discreetly decline the offer to hold the crab when something within me whispered, Lean into this, Hitendra. Do not decline—lean in. I had no idea what good might come of it. But I rose, I walked over, and I held the crab.

What a strange thing, I thought, to be celebrating this moment alongside my dear fellow guests, while my heart silently aches at the thought of what is going to happen to this king crab.

Then, a voice emerged within me. Hitendra, you are quite clearly not going to dash out of the restaurant with the crab and deposit him in the nearest ocean! His destiny is sealed. So just accept that which you cannot change. Yet even now, in this moment, what can you do for him?

And the answer came.

As everyone smiled and the cameras snapped and the server cheered, I looked down at the crab. Quietly, just for him, I whispered:

Dear one. You have lived a good life, a full life, and have grown to be this very impressive crab. Your life has had many an adventure. Now your time has come to ride into the sunset. Your soul will move on to what its next adventure will be, which you’ll only discover once this crab life of yours is done. Thank you for all the good you’ve done in this life in the marine world. Now go, without fear, to ascend to what awaits you on the other side. Know that you are deeply loved by the universe, by the ocean, and by me.

And that was it. He was carried away.

Conversation continued with zest around our table. Our food arrived, I sent out one last loving thought for the crab’s soul-journey, and my own soul returned to its peace within.

Our Greater Family

That night, I was not meant to save the crab. I realized, though, that I could be with him.

A film I love on this theme is My Octopus Teacher, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary. I had the privilege of having its director, Craig Foster, on my Intersections podcast. He’s a truly special soul who has spent decades exploring the wild, from the underwater kelp forests off the Cape of Good Hope to the Kalahari with its San trackers.

When the psychologist Dacher Keltner once asked Craig how he would describe his bond with the octopus, Craig answered: 

“You feel this tremendous kinship. And in very rare sort of moments of grace you see a part of yourself. I think it activates a deep love, for the wild, for nature. And for all its tremendous intricacy and sophistication and wonder.”

Kinship. The recognition that on the other side of the aquarium glass or the forest trail is another being of the same great family.

In our conversation on Intersections, Craig reflected on how, as he built relationships with the marine life in the kelp forest, something unexpected happened in his human life:

“I noticed some of my human relationships changing. I wasn’t as reliant on those human relationships. I could draw so much appreciation and love from these wild kin and it took pressure off of some of the human relationships. When we cut that off, of course we are going to rely more heavily and put more pressure on our human relationships.”

Could some of the strain we carry in our human bonds be the ache of a soul cut off from the wider family it once knew?

I asked Craig why he called the octopus his teacher rather than his friend.

“Because she was just so much more than a friend. She had such a powerful influence on me. She taught me so much about her species. I would have thought it would be undermining in a way or dishonorable to just call her my friend. A friend is a wonderful thing. But she was so much more than that. She was a real teacher. I felt small in some ways in comparison to her… Each day was a privilege to learn more and more from her.”

Could it be that all of nature is simply a play of life connecting with life: life listening to life, life learning from life… life lighting life?

The Third Path

We are on occasion placed at tables we did not set. In those moments, we sometimes go silent and look away. Other times, we might make a scene and harden the room against us.

But there is a third path. It is the path of staying. Fully, lovingly, with eyes open. Offering whatever grace is ours to give.

We may not always be able to change what happens around us. But we can change what is present within it. And every time we choose presence over avoidance, tenderness over indifference, kinship over distance, we bring our species, in some small way, into fellowship with the rest of the living world.

We come a little more home.

With a full heart,
Hitendra

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