On Monday I had a good experience of the fact that sometimes things do not turn out exactly as I imagined or maybe hoped for. I am in the middle of a house relocation and one part of the schedule did not slot into place knocking other dependent elements into a waiting pattern.
I noticed that this produced two effects in the mind. The first – a very familiar occurrence – is to create doubt, and an immediate subtle tendency to blame myself arises. Not good enough. Should have foreseen that. Should have checked. Should not have been so naive. It is noticeable that when some thing goes wrong we quickly move to think that we are wrong. In those moments, if we look closely, we can feel separate and alone. A gut sense of us as deficient can come into play. Stories – about ourselves and about how our lives are going – are always arising in our minds and we can mistake them for reality. Practice helps us to see this as a process rather than holding onto the content and to turn our attention to how do we want to work with it. In other words space enters in.
Another thing I noticed is the habit of turning our plans into some sort of determined goal, and losing our focus on the path which is always fluid and ongoing. In other words, we already have a fixed outcome in our mind and failing to achieve that creates dissatisfaction. Our sense of things being right is attached to the future turning out in a particular way, which may or may not happen. This means that we do not find it as easy to respond to what actually happens, and to stay in the present moment. Our practice is to find happiness in what is actually happening and not attaching it to what we thought should have happened, and then going on to blame ourselves, others or events.
