Life doesn’t always work out the way you want it to.
Life doesn’t always go as planned.
We long to do things as we please. When we cannot have things our way, we suffer and remain in agony. When our wishes seem to be beyond our capacity, we turn to others; if this does not work, we even turn to deities in order to get what we want. For our wishes to be fulfilled whomever we pray to should be omnipotent; this way we create all-powerful gods. When faced with extreme hardship we can turn to these gods out of faith, which might be temporarily helpful. However, this is not what a practitioner of Buddhism does. Their practice serves as the means to realize that life does not always go as we want it to.
It is not necessarily good to have your wishes fulfilled. If the world were to grant the wishes of every single person, the world will turn not into heaven but into hell. For instance, if you fell in love with someone that many other women also fancied, what would happen? Many women would fight over him, resulting in complete disorder. What if no one wanted to go to work but still wanted to become rich? What would happen to society? Such a society cannot function, and would become overcrowded with lazy people who put forth no effort yet expect great rewards.
People are prone to arrogance when things go as they wish. However, this does not mean that life should go against one’s wishes. There are both times when our wishes are fulfilled and not fulfilled, but there are more times when life goes against our wishes. The very fact that life generally goes against our desires is what maintains the world as it is now.
If it doesn’t work, try a different approach
If you have goals to fulfill, make the effort to achieve them. If you fail even after putting great effort forth, study the reason for failure. Seek a new method and try again. If you still cannot fulfill it, let it go. If you refuse to give up, you try again. This is life.
You feel joy when you succeed in achieving your goals. But achieving your goals does not imply that you are completely done by any means. You are not free to just fool around; rather, you set another goal and begin the cycle again. Think about this carefully. Taking on a new task after completing one and re-doing a task after a failure is in fact the same thing. It makes no difference whether you do the same thing twice or do two different tasks in succession. Having rice for breakfast, ramen for lunch, and noodles for dinner is the same as having rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the sense that regardless of what you eat, you have eaten three meals for the day. Therefore it is not important whether or not you have achieved your goal after being committed to it. It is more important how fully and diligently you do your job in the process. When successful, you move on to another task; when the results are unsatisfactory, you decide between continuing with the current job or undertaking another. If you know that in the end both are the same, you will not be afraid of anything you do.
People often say, “This can’t be happening to me.” However, can something that is beyond reality actually happen? No. Things happen because they are always within the realm of possibility.
Many unimaginable things happen in this world. For practical reasons, we cannot be aware everything that happens. If we were aware of all the thoughts of our spouse and children then our head would explode. Therefore, in some ways it is better for us to live our life without knowing everything.
Not being shackled by the outcomes of life, a truly liberated being
We should not agonize over outcomes that are unfavorable to us. If we examine our lives in depth, among the many things we wanted to happen we also have one or two things that did not go as we desired but our lives still moved on. Of course we will face some difficulties and obstacles, but in those cases it is not necessary to agonize over them in order to try again. If we want to pursue the same thing then all we have to do is try again. Otherwise just stop. Either way, it is not necessary to stress out. Once we come to the realization that doing the same type of work a hundred times and doing a hundred different tasks is all the same work, then life will be simpler.
If we agonize over things that did not turn out the way we envisioned, we will live in misery for the rest of our lives. Moreover, we will always tremble with fear and cling onto others. Does every business in the world end up successful? No. Also, do all students get accepted to the schools they want to attend? Don’t most students want to go to Ivy League schools? Even so, if a student does not get into an Ivy League school, he is still okay. As parents, if we think that we can do something about our children’s successes or failures then we are acting out of selfishness. Instead, if our children come to us after they experience failure, we as parents should empower ourselves through cultivation of our minds so that we can give emotional support and courage for them to continue on with their life.
If we keep thinking about the past and have negative views of our present, then our lives will be complicated. Acceptance is the most important thing in life. We can perform best when our minds are in calm state and thus able to let go of any attachments. Regardless of success or failure, let it go.
When I was entering the monastic life my teacher once said that I will have a short life. I did not know if it would hold true or not but I continued to live my life to the fullest. To live life frivolously would have been a waste of even a short life so I lived as though every day were my last and put that same energy into each day, and today I continue to live. To think of the rest of my life as a bonus puts my mind more at ease and allows me to live a more liberated life. Before, I worried over things not going the way I wanted, but nowadays I think that I have done the things that needed to be done during my given life span and anything from that point onward are just extra days given to me, and so I worry less. Therefore, for me dying today or tomorrow does not matter because I have no regrets.
So, if you tumble and fail in life do not breakdown; instead find the courage to move on or try again. Be courageous and do things to the fullest. As humans we will mature more effectively when we taste some failure. If you look at plants, those that grow straight upward will eventually fall over, but those that grow up and outward with many divergent branches appear fuller with many leaves. With cultivation of our minds we can become more composed people. “Everything will be okay. Everything is going well. I have no worries.” When you pray, do it with this mind set, and have a positive outlook. Only then, even when things do not go the way we wanted them to, we will not live in agony or constantly worry. In conclusion, I hope that all of you will always live your lives with gratitude.
