Question: What do you do when someone is watching you and expecting you to behave better? If you know you are being watched and choose to be ordinary instead of excellent, is that held against you? For example, being a very relaxed person might be considered lazy and in some situations it would probably be laziness not to do something today and leave it for tomorrow. Being lazy with one's own things verses being lazy with other people's things. How much does being lazy or being an extremely relaxed person get you in trouble? I look at a friend of mine and he is always wired to do something. Whereas that button was not installed when I was made. I look for that button to push that says "okay let’s do this now" and there is silence. So I go for another nap or another book to read. Or better yet let’s sit under the blue sky for a few hours and watch the clouds go by.
Where is the question? Does laziness get you in trouble with anybody else but yourself?
Response: Laziness gets us in trouble with both others and us.
At the everyday level, laziness gets us into trouble with others because we didn’t do what they were hoping we would, what we told them we would, or what everyone knew we should. So we disappointed others or frustrated them. Bottom line: whether a family member, a friend, or a co-worker, our being lazy made things more difficult for them.
From the Buddhist perspective, our laziness can serve as a cause for others to have wandering or negative thoughts. True, others have a choice in how they react to our laziness. But because we are the trigger that leads to their reaction, we have a karmic connection and will undergo certain karmic consequences.
At the everyday level, laziness gets us into trouble with ourselves because we didn’t do what we knew we should. So we feel guilty or irritated or anxious. Or we question what it is doing to us.
From the Buddhist perspective, laziness again gets us into trouble, this time because instead of doing what we should to progress toward awakening, we’re wasting time in wandering thoughts and pointless activities. Here we are, in one of those unbelievably rare lifetimes when we encounter the Dharma and have all the right conditions to be able to practice, and what do we do with this rare and wondrous opportunity?
We take a nap. We read a book. We stare at the sky.
We tell ourselves we have plenty of time. We tell ourselves that we’ll chant later this afternoon. We tell ourselves we’ll listen to that Dharma talk sometime tomorrow. We do what is easy, not what is wise. We give ourselves excuses. We’re lazy.
And we do ourselves an unimaginable disservice as we fail to take advantage of this rarest of opportunities.
So with others and ourselves, in matters small and large, laziness gets us into unimaginable trouble and does us great harm.