Soul Over Matter. Zhi Gang Sha

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СКАЧАТЬ for a reason, and that reason is there to serve.

      What to do when things go wrong? Forgive yourself, forgive others, and find the reason that is there to serve. Find the nugget of wisdom. The lesson. And move forward to something even better.

      Don’t avoid the mistakes because you’re afraid you might be something less.

      Celebrate the mistakes, because without them you just might be.

       I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.

       —Thomas A. Edison

      Just like Thomas Edison, who made more than ten thousand attempts before he found the proper substance to make the filament for the lightbulb, you too have found ways that won’t work and you are on your way to inventing what will work to light your version of a lightbulb. And it will most likely take a lot less than ten thousand tries.

Hold On Lightly: Letting Go of Expectations

       The root of suffering is attachment.

       —Buddha

      Expectation can be a heady, intoxicating feeling. Looking forward to that first date. Dreaming of your next vacation or your annual bonus. Picturing the new car you’ll buy when your lease expires or the new home you’ll move into after your wedding. They’re all exciting plans for the future, and they carry an emotional charge that gives us a little boost of pleasure when we anticipate them.

      On the surface, that seems pretty harmless. After all, what could be wrong with having something to look forward to?

      The problem occurs when expectations grow into a powerful form of attachment, and that has some very real potential side effects.

      Expectations have a way of evolving into a need to have things turn out in a very specific way. You get so caught up in exactly how you expect something to be that you can’t accept anything different. You’re attached to an outcome that’s so specific—the perfect weather for your perfect wedding day—that you can’t enjoy the real value of the moment.

      Attachment also puts energy anywhere but in the present. It’s a focus on the future—this is where I’m going or someday I’ll have that. Or it’s a focus on the past—I’m not going back there again or I deserve better because of all that hard work. As a result, attachment has a way of becoming like wearing a set of blinders: You can miss opportunities and possibilities that are just outside your narrow field of vision. When you’re too attached, you simply can’t see them.

      So how, then, do we resolve the need to have goals for the future—to plan and set a course for where we want to be—with the dangers of attachment?

      To start with, instead of goals, I prefer the term intention. In law intent is a big deal. When we look to where criminality lies—in determining first-degree or second-degree murder, for example—we rely on intent. Did the person intend to cause harm or was it accidental or negligent?

      Intention is a powerful force in law and no less so in life. Where a goal is a wish, an intention is a declaration of the energy behind an outcome. Goals can be a slippery slope to attachment; intention, on the other hand, is about the energy of the present.

      Once you have an intention, it’s time to walk the tightrope. You need to set an intention, but then let go of the outcome—be willing to let go of your need to have things work out in a certain way. You must be willing to detach.

      This can be a tricky idea. Detaching isn’t about not caring. After all, how can you stay motivated to do what’s required to move ahead in life if you don’t care? What you’re really detaching from is the meaning of things. Consider the following statements:

      If I get the promotion, I’ll be respected.

      If I earn this much, I’ll be happy.

      If I have this and that, people will look up to me.

      Those are all ways of attaching meaning to things and events, and it’s that meaning that has the power to cause suffering. Detach from the meaning, and you detach from suffering the fear of a failed outcome.

      Set the intention, but detach from the meaning. Accept that the outcome may be different, and the path impossible to see. Imagine that your intention is a beautiful rose that you hold in your hands. Hold it too loosely and you lose it. But hold it too tightly and you crush it.

      The secret is to hold on lightly.

The Trim Tab Factor

      In my midtwenties, before my pivot to life as an attorney, I was working in New York City as a public school teacher. My wife was a teacher, too, but working on Long Island.

      During her time there she met a couple with a boat. We hit it off, and one weekend they invited us to go with them to Block Island—a trip of a hundred miles or so from Port Washington.

      The boat was large enough and comfortable enough for the trip, but it was no cruise ship. We didn’t have the radar you might find on a larger ship, but instead something called LORAN, a system of radio beacons and charts that could be used to navigate from waypoint to waypoint.

      Our boat also had trim tabs—small steel planes that could be adjusted to keep the boat more level in the water. As I learned, changes in the angle of the boat in the water could not only make you more or less efficient, but over a long journey those changes could also have an effect on your path through the water and take you off your charted course.

      Now, on a clear day, you can see Block Island from the mainland. It’s not exactly an Atlantic crossing—no big deal at all on a clear day with calm weather. During our trip, however, a fog bank rolled in and we couldn’t see much past the bow of the boat.

      It’s an unsettling experience to hit bad weather on the ocean. What seems incredibly benign and easy in one sunny moment can become quite threatening when the weather changes in the next. There we were in a twenty-seven-foot boat, unable to see anything and surrounded by a very, very big ocean. If we lost our way, we could run out of gas in the Atlantic, adrift to who knew where. Not an appealing prospect.

      To complicate matters, the area was full of boat traffic, much of it a lot bigger than us. We certainly couldn’t see them, and we couldn’t count on them seeing us or even being able to adjust course in time if they could.

      In short order, our pleasant sea voyage seemed to become very serious.

      What if we lost our way or missed a waypoint? I knew that tiny mistakes in our direction could stack up and lead us many miles off course. Navigating accurately became priority number one, and part of that was a near-constant process of adjusting the trim tabs and tweaking the rudder and controls to make sure we traveled successfully from one waypoint to the next.

      Of course, we made the trip just fine, but it has occurred to me many times since that life isn’t so different. You make these small changes in your direction all the time, and over the course of months, then years, then decades, they have an enormous difference in where you arrive and when—it’s the trim tab factor of life.

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