Achieve Peace: The Mindfulness community here at IBM is very encouraging that I felt like sharing one of my experiences. This is my second post (first post: Time, An Illusion) here in this community. I once went from office by 5:00 P.M. and by the time I reached home it was 5:30 P.M. I was so tired and exhausted that I badly needed bed just to lie down and relax / take some rest. I felt like smoking a cigarette (I am trying to quit BTW), so I went to the terrace, sat there comfortably, lit the cigarette, smoked and was done with the smoke. I did enjoy the cigarette, but every time I inhaled the smoke, I knew I was just intoxicating my body and I was going against my body.
The very enjoyment that I got out of smoking was not possible if I didn’t have the body at all. My mind was just throwing thoughts at me to go home and take rest, but my body was quite comfortable right at that place. There was cool breeze, the calling of the birds flying towards their nests, the almost reddish sky, the clouds being pushed by the air, the indistinct chattering of people in the surroundings, the silence that descended upon me, it was quite an experience just to simply sit there watching the sunset.
The sun taught me that it was in no hurry to finish the process of setting itself. It took its time. I sat there for half an hour or so. Peace was possible right there. The process of sitting had so much of peace within it. The action was performed with the intention not to finish it, but to simply do it. Simply sitting is considered to be a futile act in our present technology-driven world. People usually say ‘Do something, don’t simply sit’, but it should have been otherwise like, ‘Simply Sit, don’t do anything’.
Achieve Peace – Action Vs Non-Action
Not doing anything sounds very unproductive, but if the Vehicle is always on and running, the vehicle would break sooner and turn every act into a disaster. The body is also a vehicle where you live and use it to perform all the actions. The non-action is as important as the action. The condition of the vehicle is one of the many deciding factors of how long the vehicle can run. Working on the vehicle is an intelligent step one should make before going to take part in a race. Similarly, before we jump into action, we should truly be happy and peaceful with our non-action. How we are decides the quality of the action we perform.
In other words, our non-action decides the quality of our action. You better know how an angry person reacts. The anger is the non-action and the reaction is the action s/he performs. To understand this better, we all know that one family member contributes his / her non-action to the entire family. His / her presence is adequate to run the family smoothly and with less contradictions. Without them, the family wouldn’t be the same. Remember, non-action always comes first. Action comes later.
A Joke: A young man was in a great hurry pulling his bicycle somewhere. An old man stopped him and asked where he was pulling the bicycle in such a hurry. The old man suggested that he could sit on the bicycle and ride, to which the young man replied, ‘You old fool, I’ve no time at all for such nonsense. I am in a great hurry.’
Exactly like this, we are so blinded by our goals and ambitions that we have no time at all to nurture our bodies. We just exploit them to achieve our goals. And, we have tied all the peace of mind to our goals. We are trying to achieve peace by achieving our goals. Live NOW! Peace is possible now!
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