Change the world: be lazy, be kind

We share below an excerpt, with permission, from a post by practitioner Doran Amos on lessons learnt from a year living at Plum Village. Read the whole thing over on Medium.

“During my time at Plum Village and in the years since then, I have been absorbing some valuable lessons. The first is to do with effort and fulfilment. At school we all learn that to get where you want to be in life, to be successful, you have to work hard, right? Wrong.

It all comes back to living moments that are worth living, right now.

We know how to do the rat race, and we know how to get hyped about the next iPhone, the next Netflix series, the next weekend that’s coming.

But looked at plainly, life is nothing but an unending stream of now. If we can’t be happy now, then when will we be? Mindfulness practice is the art of having enough now, being enough now, living now. The wider culture we live in is often trying to pull us towards the pursuit of a future happiness — that career, that person, that money, that fame which will finally “do it” for us — but they never do quite “do it”, do they? Luckily, noone can ever take from us the potential for happiness and freedom we have right here, right now. It is up to us to find a lifestyle and friends that can support us in learning how to touch that more often.”

If you want success, you may sacrifice your happiness for it. You can become a victim of success, but you can never become a victim of happiness.

Thich Nhat Hanh