And the Winner of Best Director Goes to…

The way our minds work is very strange. The smallest little thing we see or hear can totally change how we feel. Someone casts a smile in our direction or treats us in a way that we like, and that’s enough for us to love them and feel happy. If a few moments later that same person looks at us with what we take to be a scowl, or if we feel they don’t like us, then that’s enough for us to feel sad and curl up in a ball and cry. We are constantly at the mercy of external appearances, spending our lives reacting to what we perceive. But we put ourselves in that position.

It’s all our own creation. A smile itself is neither good nor bad –– we decide and label how things are. But if we can take a step back, retain some control and analyse how this process works, without becoming so involved with what appears to us, these emotional swings will become less turbulent.

It’s for this sake that we as Buddhists train our minds, so that we don’t easily fall under the sway of external objects, so that we are more in control. So Buddhism shouldn’t really be considered a religion or even a tradition as such. It’s just something that’s fundamentally helpful –– helpful for seeing the way things work and thereby gaining some independence and freedom. We start to call the shots.