Nourishing Conditions for a Life to Flourish
Is life just a burden to bear?
Life is too short and precious. It’s not worth living it mostly with sadness, misery and frustrations. However, we know that we cannot eradicate difficulties out of our lives for good because life in and of itself is not engineered by nature to be easy and painless; aging, pain, loss, and sickness are inevitable. These all sound like bad news and if we spend too much time just thinking about these things, it can be very paralyzing – if life is intrinsically full of suffering, what’s the point of our existence anyway? Where do we find joy? How do we find purpose?
“Energy flows where the attention goes…”
Thinking too much about all the sufferings in life can easily make one feel quite pessimistic. Nevertheless, accepting that life is going to be difficult at times can make one to be realistic. There are no good days and bad days; but there are easy days and difficult days. And there are rainy days and there are sunny days. To determine that rainy days are bad and sunny days are good comes from within, doesn’t it? If we can sit here and pause for a moment to ponder on that thought: how one sees the world comes from within. Is it true for you? If it is, that actually is good news because that means life is not just a serial bundle of sufferings in which we have to live passively and miserably endure. We are capable of change. But, what are the causes and conditions for this change to take place?
The Middle Way – surrendering to the flow of the Universe
First, we can try to understand what we mean when we say causes and conditions. Let us use an example of a person planting a seed to grow a tree in his garden to understand the subtle difference between causes and conditions. Naturally, this person will plant the seed properly at a place where it can receive enough sun; he will nourish the soil; he will water it regularly; he will watch out for some animals who may accidentally come dig it out, etc. With his goodwill and his vision of a healthy tree coming into existence, he will diligently do these things. For a good amount of time, he will keep doing these things but nothing will happen; it’s probably the same empty ground for several days. But if he trusts his goodwill and his vision, this will not stop him from doing all the things that he has been doing and he’s supposed to be doing. And one day, one morning, he sees a small plant coming out of the ground; it is a magical moment and it brings him joy. How did this happen? And how does this even relate to what we were talking earlier about life?
Setting Conditions for the Middle Way
In simple terms, some conditions may be within our control but the causes may not be. In the example above, the gardener was only setting favorable conditions for the plant to grow. When the plant finally springs out of the ground and eventually starts growing bigger to be a beautiful tree, there is something greater than the gardener at work. The gardener is not the cause for the plant to grow. This subtle difference between the cause and the condition is very pivotal in navigating through difficulties in life because this understanding can spare us unnecessary stresses and burdens. In a way, this view helps us to see ourselves no greater than who we really are or no less than who we are meant to be. When one is grieving for a loss, the grieve will not disappear right away at will. It will be a process. He or she can set favorable conditions for happier days just like the gardener did with his plants. When the grieve does go away one day, it is as a result of something greater than the one who is grieving at work. The key here is to “allow” it to happen. Again, life is too short and precious. It’s not worth living it mostly with sadness, misery and frustrations. But it definitely is worth doing what we are capable of doing the best which will set conditions for our lives to flourish – and the tree will grow tall, stable, wise and beautiful.
