.
Perhaps the human mind is just hard-wired that way ...
Conceive of a goal, any goal, and the mind, because it conceived of the goal in lickety-split fashion, imagines that that goal can be achieved with an equal speed. There is a sense of inadequacy that can set in when the patient, determined steps required for actually achieving the goal become apparent. Success comes in a nanosecond ... until anyone tries it. Money, college degrees, spiritual longings ... same stuff, different day. Hope and belief are called in to mitigate the sense of inadequacy, but ... still Rome wasn't built in a day. The mind has its wiles and will not be denied.
One day, when I was a kid, I was skiing on a public slope. I loved going to the top of the hill and then zipping down it at whatever break-neck speed I could attain. I was having a lot of fun. But at one point, after I had reclimbed the hill and was preparing for another rice-rocket run, a man I didn't know slid up next to me and said without preamble, "Any asshole can ski fast. It takes a good skiier to ski slow." I was conditioned to listen to adults. I was also not used to hearing them cuss in my presence. The cuss word combined with the fact that I did not know this person served to sink his advice into me.
For the rest of the day, I practiced skiing slowly. It was hard work and I fell down more times than I ever had during my earlier zippy descents.
I never talked to the man again and I never became a really good skiier, but I tried.
Funny how, the more you climb the daunting peak, the less daunting it becomes, until, at last, you wonder what stupid 'peak' you were talking about in the first place.
Sorta like Zen practice.
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:-)
ReplyDeleteI bought a japanese brand laptop almost two years ago when my first also-japanese brand laptop spoilt as it is because it was used to being carried around on the public transport. I find that the clocks spin rather fast at was it a few thousand giga-hertz or mega-hertz I already lost touch with speed. Yet I am stuck with this super fast laptop which has got 4 processors each running at 2400billions of revolutions per second and I wonder why do I need such a machine when I type at 100 words per 5 minutes.
ReplyDeleteRecently because I met some systems that are designed specially for older yesteryear hardware I have been experimenting .. including a particular Bodhi Linux which are supposedly designed by Buddhists in US and meant for slow users like me who use a computer seated on a meditation cushion and perhaps I would roll out Bodhi for several of my closet machines since 1990s
.. A gentleman asked me if my purpose was to earn money from a Software which is fundamentally provided free, seriously I am so slow these days that I realise the slower I am at spending money the slower I am needed to earn as well.
As Confucius remarked "It does not matter how slow I go as long as I do not stop" i imagine at 2400billion revolutions per second how do I tell which spin is more correct than the other and there and then I recall that everything that works these days somehow or rather has to be credited to the Tathagata or whichever name they prefer
These are days when I realise I can type English so fast (100 words per 5 minutes) I realise it is time I learn or relearn either the keyboard or a language that I have taken for granted.
thx