Juggling bricks?
The Apply:
Step into the cloud.
Why?
I had a lightbulb second just lately: I used to be feeling burdened about all of the stuff I needed to do (you in all probability know the sensation). After this went on for some time, I stepped again and sort of watched my thoughts, and will see that I used to be considering of those varied duties as issues, like large rocks that have been rolling down a hill towards me and which wanted to be dealt with, lifted, moved, fended off, or damaged into pebbles. As quickly as I handled one thingy boulder, one other one was rolling towards me. Shades of Sisyphus.
Seen as brick-like entities, no surprise these duties felt heavy, oppressive, and burdensome. Yuch!
However then I spotted that actually, the duties I wanted to do have been extra like clouds than issues. Clouds are made up of a number of vaporous little bits, these bits come collectively for a time because of many swirling causes, after which they swirl away once more. In the meantime, the sting or boundary of a cloud blurs into different clouds or the sky itself. There’s a sort of insubstantiality to clouds, and a softness, a yielding.
For instance, take writing an electronic mail message: It has a number of little elements to it (the factors it’s essential take note of, and the phrases and sentences), it’s nested in a bigger context – your relationship to the receiver, the wants that prompted the e-mail – that (in a way) calls it forth, and it emerges and passes away. This electronic mail, this process, hyperlinks to different duties, form of blurs into them. Basically, the e-mail is a sort of course of, an occasion, reasonably than a factor. It’s like you would put your hand by it.
Once I thought-about my duties on this method, I instantly felt higher: relieved, and relaxed. Duties felt fluid, like streams or eddies I used to be getting into and influencing or contributing to as finest I might earlier than they swirled on and have become one thing else. Not so weighty or stuffed with inertia; not so resistant, so controlling of me; not bearing down on me, however as a substitute, one thing I used to be flowing into. Then I didn’t really feel weary coping with them. They grew to become enjoyable, and lighter; there was extra freedom in transferring by them.
And it’s not simply duties which are clouds. In a method, every little thing is a cloud. All the pieces is fabricated from elements (“compounded”), every little thing arises because of causes (so nothing has absolute self-existence – even “I”), and every little thing passes away ultimately. All the pieces in your expertise and every little thing “on the market” within the universe is a cloud: each sensation, thought, object, physique, job, profession, exercise, relationship, rock, raindrop, planet, galaxy, and second.
This doesn’t imply that clouds are meaningless or that they don’t have penalties. The truth is, while you relate to the world on this method, you’re feeling extra linked to it, extra part of it, extra tender towards it, and extra accountable for it. You like the cloud!