Accidents

We live our lives thinking permanence exists. Permanence does not exist. The Universe itself is temporary and imperfect.

Recently, my friend, Peter, was sitting in his ninth floor apartment on a Thursday afternoon. It was a sunny late Fall day. Suddenly, water was pouring through his ceiling onto his bed and all over his apartment. A pipe on the tenth floor had broken in a wall. Peter's whole life was changed. He was suddenly homeless. His routines were shattered. His belongings were destroyed or damaged. All this happened in minutes. The rest of the large metropolis around him was indifferently unaffected by the disruption of his whole world.

Exercising the mind and spirit to accommodate to change in daily practice is essential to develop the skills to deal with crisis. Crisis is inevitable, no matter how prepared we are. Life itself is change.

Folly

Belief in permanence is the greatest folly of the human mind.

We are impermanent phenomena. We change from moment to moment without control or intention. Our bodies are similar to chemical reactions in a test tube. They begin, proceed and end. All this occurs according to physical and chemical laws of energy and matter. That's it!

Living a happy and compassionate life with the constant awareness of this reality takes practice. Folly is the absence of practice and is a waste of human intelligence.