Let me make a disclaimer right at the beginning here, I know hardly anything about sailing and so I won’t be teaching you how to do it.
I ran across this quote, and coupled with today being a beautiful breezy day I just imagined a leisurely sail on a lake, or something like that.
“A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner.” (English Proverb)
To that quote I would like to add my own which would be without some wind you don’t have anything to fill your sail with.
Every day we invariably run up against some obstacle or another. It is these problems that shape us. We may wish for a life of ease and comfort but the reality is that as long as we live we will face obstacles of one kind or another. The choice we have is whether or not we suffer from those problems or whether we use them to grow.
If we look at the things that arise in our life as opportunities for personal development, yes I know that’s hard to do, then we can develop the kind of life that no longer suffers from those same difficulties. Eventually as we grow and develop we become more skillful at dealing with life events, and then they no longer trouble us. In fact the more we work with them the more they motivate us to move forward.
The skilled mariner becomes so, because of the variety of experiences he overcomes on the seas. Over time as the skill becomes more deeply absorbed then those same difficulties are easy to handle.
We are, in our Buddhist practice, trying to do something kind of unique. We are in a sense going out looking for storms so we can gain the experience. The kind of storms we are looking to navigate are our anger, our attachments, our laziness, our fear, and the countless other things in our life that prevent us from experiencing enlightenment.
We go looking for those storms so that we can eventually sail peacefully on life’s water.
“We once had many troubles in the world of birth and death because of the three kinds of sufferings. We were so distracted and so ignorant that we clung to the teachings of the Lesser Vehicle. At that time you caused us to think over all things and to clear away the dirt of fruitless discussions about them.” (Lotus Sutra, Chapter IV)
In our practice of Buddhism we are certain to undergo many difficulties, the trick is to see them as chances to change something in our life. There is some underlying cause for every problem, the challenge is to open our lives up to the discovery rather than lamenting the difficulty. It seems natural to try to avoid hardship, yet in many ways be actively seeking those things that trouble us the most we can create a chance to overcome the thing within us that is actually preventing us from happiness.
“The Buddha said, ‘this is suffering. This is the cause of suffering. This is extinction of suffering. This is the Way to extinction of suffering.’” (Lotus Sutra, Chapter VII)
reprinted from May 20, 2012
