One’s Life Can Be a Vehicle for Blessing

I’ve been turning my attention this month to the parami of Patience, using Ajahn Sucitto’s “Parami: Ways to Cross Life’s Floods,” for inspiration. Here’s a quote that surprised and energized me (emphasis mine):

“…It is patience, if cultivated thoroughly and insightfully, that penetrates our will to do, or intention (cetana). Intention is the mental activation that seeks, wavers and tightens… Intention directs one’s attention and interest in a particular way, so corresponding concerns and aims come to mind, and sometimes speech or bodily action follows. And this is what our ‘world’ is made of. 

“…The world stops, or rather doesn’t get created, when that process of seeking, wavering and tightening stops. Transcendence, or crossing over, finally means that the movement of mind, which tries to circumvent, forget, defeat, stop, divert, allay or placate — stops. In that stopping, the very conditions that appear to confront us evaporate. And through knowing that, one is unafraid of conditions; one does not hanker after them and one is not intimidated by them.

“Patience is a big part of that. With patience, instead of trying to wriggle out of suffering, one learns to be still and to release the mind from its willfulness and possessiveness…

“And you can even feel respect for the ungrateful and the exasperating. They help you to wear out your addiction to self-view, to having your own way. And they help you to lose your fascination or irritation with the personalities of other people, and all that which is just kamma and no real self at all. Then you say ‘Thank you’ to pointless situations and people who irritate you.

“This is the perfection of patience: it can make one’s life a vehicle for blessing.”

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Photo by Greg & Lois Nunes on Unsplash