Four Ordinary Truths
Believing otherwise is a cause of self-made misery
- No Problems
There are no problems in life. The things that look like problems? — Those are life.
2. No End of Problems
The things we experience as problems are an inextricable part of life itself. You can’t help creating problems. You can’t avoid problems you didn’t create. Most days, there seems to be a Law of the Conservation of Problems: Problems are neither created nor destroyed; they just change from one form to another.
3. What You Can Change
You can’t change the facts of living in a body on this earth among other people — growing old and dying, hunger and cold and loneliness, longing for what you do not have, physical pain, pain at the suffering of others, reliving the past, rejecting the present, a divided mind, always a mixture of happiness and suffering, imagining perfection but never able to live it, the disappointment that comes after getting what you wanted, and on and on.
These are some of the ordinary facts of existence, and you can’t change them. They will never go away. Believing otherwise is a main cause of self-made misery.
What can you can change? — your relationship to these facts.
4. How to Change
The way to change your relationship to life and its problems is to become more kind, aware, appreciative, patient, constructive, and contented — with the provision that you help others achieve the freedom and the means to choose that, too.
What? It’s that simple?
Oh, wait. That’s not simple at all, is it? Hmmm.
5. And One More
There is a fifth ordinary truth: Whatever else you may find, as long as you continue to pay attention to your ordinary life, it will continue to be endlessly interesting.
… with apologies to Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths.
