THE COSBY DOCTRINE

I read a transcript of LARRY KING LIVE the other day (because, uh, that's what guys like me do in their spare time, when they can never figure out when the suspender- guy's show is on over here), the one where he was interviewing the author of the second most bestselling non-fiction book in NEW YORK TIMES history, a self-help book called THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE. (And if you don't know what that book is, then you don't exist in the same universe as all of those folks that voted for Bush do.) He's a pastor named Rick Warren, I think, and he said some things that reminded me of a Buddhist expression I heard somewhere:

Your life is not yours. It can be taken from you at any time.

This particular Christian author made a similar point: Look, this is not a self-help book, because self-help books all say: It's all about you, and I'm saying, right from the start, this isn't about you at all. Your life is not yours and yours alone.

That's the gist. (Cool word, gist. Not used often enough.)

We think of our lives as ours, to have and to hold 'till death to us part -- wedding vows of one. We make the rules, baby. We decide the course of our fate. We captain the ship.

I look at it this way. A few years back a homeless lunatic whacked me with the equivalent of a hockey stick across the gut in Tokyo, leaving a nasty bruise that was a gift, if only because had the man thwapped me in the face, I could be missing an eye right now. My life would have been altered in ways I really don't care to think about. He's already taken something from me -- my naive sense of security that only a Canadian can have. (Or maybe a Nebraskan.) He could have taken my pupils, my jugular, you name it.

Whether you look at it in Buddhist terms or Christian terms or no terms at all, your life is hanging by a fragile thread, baby. All of your dreams, aspirations, fears and fragilities are one whisker away from being sliced and diced, late-night style. (I'm not sure what that last part means, either, but I'll go with it.) We all have our personal space and our personal rights and our own personal integrity, yes, true, acknowledged, but there is a truck, see, just down the street, travelling quickly, and you are listening to your walkman, head bobbing, lips mouthing, thinking about that latch on your fridge that just, won't, shut, and you are slowing down, wading to the rhythm of beat and the pulse, while that truck, the one you don't know even exists, is getting ready to mow you down, no questions asked, skid-marks on pavement with brains, blood and skull-bits being mandatory, not optional.

Remember Heathcliff Huxtable talking to Theo on THE COSBY SHOW? "I am your father," he said. "I brought you in this world, and I can take you out." There's the Powell doctrine; this is the Cosby doctrine. Now, I don't know if there's a Father up there bringing us in and taking us out. (If there is, I think he just might look like Cosby -- stern but goofy.) But I know now, more than I did before, that we can all be taken out, whether anybody's in charge up there or not.

This can all be taken from you, this life, and it's helpful to remember that we are taking away other's lives, all the time, constantly. Everyday we take something away from someone else by a warm wave of the hand, a snide comment, or a friendly nod of the head, whether we realize it or not. Not their life, of course, we don't take that, we give them that, we allow them that, but there's a myriad of insignificant acts that shape our interactions that don't conceive or disintegrate our lives, no, but they add to them. They subtract.

There's more to life than life itself.

(Unless you're a serial killer or a soldier or a sniper. Then you do take lives, literally. I met a dude my first week in Japan at a bar: Me: What do you do? Dude: I'm a sniper with the marines: Me: Oh. Thinking -- You kill people; I, um, teach ESL...)

We give and we take. And given that Cosby was always handing out morals like candy to little Rudy, here's one of my own: Try not to take too much of other's lives, and be on guard for those that are taking yours, little by little. (And be forgiving, too. They may not know it.)