Perfect
At the Hi-Pointe Sitting Group last night….just as we were starting the meditation…someone, somewhere in the building, started practicing the drums.
Such is life.
It would have been even more fitting if I had brought the passage that I had planned to read, which is a teaching from Ajahn Chah, titled: Who is Bothering Whom?:
“In our practice, we think that noises, cars, voices, sights, are distractions that come and bother us when we want to be quiet. But who is bothering whom?
“Actually, we are the ones who go and bother them. The car, the sound, is just following its own nature.
“We bother things through some false idea that they are outside us and cling to the ideal of remaining quiet, undisturbed.
“Learn to see that it is not things that bother us, that we go out to bother them. See the world as a mirror. It is all a reflection of mind.
“When you know this, you can grow in every moment, and every experience reveals truths and brings understanding.”
–from A Still Forest Pool: The Insight Mediation of Achaan Chah, by Jack Kornfield and Paul Breiter
(image from A Whole World, by Couprie and Louchard)