Take Care Of Your Instrument

In the Buddha’s teachings, there are many stories of gods who fall from heaven because they lose their mindfulness. These tales have a moral for humans too: don’t get lost in comfort or rest in your privilege. There’s always further to fall.

We often approach life from a victim mindset. Feeling like a victim is a clever way of tricking the mind into imagining that things can only get better from here. But, in fact, they can get worse. Health, wealth, and all of society can collapse in a heartbeat, and today’s hardships may one day seem like paradise by comparison. True gratitude actually means recognizing how much there is to lose.

Your human life, with all its stress and pain, is extremely rare and precious. Not because you have a few fleeting years for fleeting pleasures, but because you have a heart — a capacity to love and be loved even when circumstances get bad. Yet that gift also comes with responsibility: to live from that heart, that knowing, rather than waste life in distraction and resentment.

The Thai ajaans speak of having healthy shame toward greed, hatred, and delusion. In the West, we don’t like the word “shame,” but this isn’t about shaming others. It’s about valuing your potential to tune into the frequency of compassion. If someone gave you a beautiful instrument and you let it break, that would be a shame, right?

I often struggle with what I see in the news, which I can relate to with great rage. I can ask whether that rage is reasonable, and I will find reasons. But that’s the wrong question. The real question is: where does it lead? To live and act with a closed heart, to harm myself and others in the process, all while thinking that being right absolves me — is that not the height of entitlement? And so I remind myself: Paul, find a way to turn this into compassion. There’s much, much further to fall.