Getting directions to Carnegie Hall. 

Have you heard the one about a visitor to New York City who stopped a passerby and asked how to get to Carnegie Hall?

The cheeky reply was “practice, practice, practice.”

No one gets to any level of proficiency without practice, focused practice. Consider mental afflictions and bad habits. Doing away with them is never an easy thing. We can all testify to that. It takes hard work and sustained effort to lessen and eventually eliminate them. To accomplish this, we need daily teachings to remind us of the importance of our work, and to encourage us.

We also need reminders to not be enticed by situations and people who consistently elicit our repetitive, harmful reactions. Suitably equipped, we need to put everything into practice. The more we do something, the better we get at it.

And gradually, with “practice, practice, practice,” we will remain calm in the face of situations that would have unsettled and waylaid us in the past.

Everything in samsara 

exists in a constant state of flux, 

ever-changing, continuously moving. 

In our comfort with the known and our worries over the unknown, we often wish things, even though far from ideal, would just stay the way they are. But life has no pause button. We cannot stop things from changing.

For example, take in a deep breath and hold it. Do not let it out, do not exhale. How do you feel? In a matter of seconds, holding our breath becomes alarmingly uncomfortable. At some point, we need to exhale and take our next breath.

Just as we cannot stop our breathing, there is no stopping change.

Change is as natural as our inhaling and exhaling. It might be helpful here to remind ourselves that Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Also, change can be for the better. We can stop our usual harmful reactions and replace them with good ones. Thus, change can be positive.