Life can become so complicated and filled by our preferences and plans that we miss the actual simple experience of life as it is, of things as they are.  We become attached to, and excessively rely on, our judgments, plans and ideas as if we really know what is going to happen.  Although we can have a good guess as to how things will be, we really don’t know.  We don’t know whether our time on this small rock we call earth will end tomorrow, or whether we’ll win the lottery (as my teacher once said, we have the same chance of winning as of their sending it to us by mistake!!!)

We can learn how happiness comes from a heart at rest and not from trying to control inexorably changing external circumstances, which we know, is like trying to capture lightning.  All of this can be discovered as the power and fruit of our practice.  That we can experience all the changes in form, feelings, mind and unfolding circumstances and remain centered and unflapped, with an open heart and a joyous spirit, is the jeweled discovery of practice.  We can live in the cradle of equanimity–unshakable evenness, balance and stability in the midst of the inevitable vicissitudes of life.