Free Into the Heart of Life by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

own joys and satisfactions.
    We are basically very selfish people. When anything happens, our very first thought is, “How will this affect me ?” Think about it. “What’s in it for me ?” If it doesn’t negatively affect oneself, then it’s all right, and we don’t care. This very self-centered way of viewing the world is one of the principal causes of our unrest, because the world is the way it is; the world is never going to fit into all our expectations and our unrealistic hopes.
    We have this human potential—our great human potential—to go beyond that to something much more profound which will give us genuine inner calm, not just superficial physical pleasure, but genuine, profound, deep, lasting happiness. It is within us; it is not “out there.” A mind which is more peaceful, more centered, and which is able to hold things lightly, which is not always grasping, which is not constantly churned on the waves of our hopes and our fears; a mind which is settled, which sees things clearly and with a heart which is open toward others, is a happy mind. And that happiness doesn’t depend on external circumstances. That mind is able to ride the waves of our external pains and pleasures. The answer lies within us.
    I met a man in Australia who was dying of leukemia; he was like a skeleton. In fact, he died the day after I visited him. He was in his fifties. Before going to meet him, I met with members of his family. His wife said to me, “Could you ask him about his funeral arrangements?”
    “Haven’t you discussed this?” I asked.
    “Oh no, no,” she said. “We can’t discuss death.”
    His mother and father, who had just celebrated their ninetieth birthdays, exclaimed, “How could this happen to us?”
    I pointed out the hospital window. “Excuse me?” I said. Crowds of people were going backwards and forwards. “You find me one person out there who hasn’t lost someone that they loved. What do you mean, ‘How could this happen to us?’ Why shouldn’t it happen to you? It happens to everybody else.”
    It is denial. We celebrate birth with dancing but we absolutely shuffle our feet when it comes to acknowledging death. Yet all of our life is a preparation for dying. If we were going to die tonight, what would we do now, right now? We’re all of us on a train and that train is going to crash for sure, so how are we going to spend the journey?
    At the time of death, do you want to die thinking, “What did I do with my life?” or, “Why have I wasted my life?” So often we plan, “Oh, I’ll start to practice when the kids get older and leave home,” or, “I’ll start to practice when I retire.” Who knows if we’re going to be around that long?
    The Buddha said that the one thing certain about life is death. That is true. It doesn’t matter how old or how young we are. I’m sure all of us have friends who were very young when they met with some tragic accident or developed some fatal disease. Who would have expected them to die? Today we are here, and tomorrow we are gone. We can’t think, “I’m going to live for three score years and ten and then I’ll die.” Who knows when we are going to die? Just because we are young and healthy today doesn’t mean we are not going to be dead tomorrow. We don’t know; none of us knows.
    Once, not so long ago, I went to a meeting with other participants very early one morning. As we drove along in the early light we saw a crowd of school-children by a school bus. They were all standing around, looking completely dazed. A woman was lying dead in the middle of the street. She had just been hit; she wasn’t covered up. She was a young woman, maybe in her thirties, wearing a gray top and faded jeans. It was quiet and the ambulance had not yet arrived. The accident had only just happened. The bus driver hadn’t seen her as she crossed the road.
    If we knew we were going to die tomorrow—and we don’t know that we’re not going to die