Each Of Us Has One Person

The Persian poet Saadi tells a story of a king stung by a bee. Enraged, the king ordered all beehives in his kingdom destroyed. His soldiers burned every hive, wiping out the bees. As a result, the ecosystem collapsed: fruit trees stopped bearing fruit, crops failed, and famine spread. Eventually, the once-rich king died of hunger, a victim of his own anger. In the West, we often misunderstand anger.

We label every irritation “sacred rage” and justify it, as if not acting on it will cause harm. But anger can ruin your life. As the Buddha said, it can make you act in ways that would make your enemies rejoice. And like the king, when anger pushes us to try to control the world around us, we can destroy the very systems that sustain us.

The mind is its own ecosystem, where happiness depends on the interaction of many conditions. When we feel unpleasant emotion, we tend to look outside ourselves for a cause to eliminate. But reacting with aversion only disturbs our inner balance, as we pull at threads we don’t understand and unravel the conditions that allow peace, clarity, and joy to exist in the first place.

Growing up means realizing that circumstances don’t change because we hate them. They change because we take responsibility for our own happiness. This doesn’t mean shutting out the world. It means shifting our attention to the only place we ever find wisdom: our inner experience of the body.

Ajaan Suwat used to say, “Each of us has one person.” He didn’t mean American-style self-reliance, in which you build a cabin in the woods and hide your pain from others. He meant that each of us has one body, one inner guidance system, one instrument for navigating life. Take care of it before you try to fix anyone else’s.