Responsibilities

The Buddha said that a sign of a wise person is knowing which responsibilities fall to you and which ones don’t, taking on only the ones that fall to you and not the ones that don’t. This really does require discernment. Some of us are like magnets that attract responsibilities. We have to learn how to say No sometimes. Otherwise, we take on too many and then none of them get done well. That’s something we have to keep in mind.

A good rule of thumb is: “If you don’t do it, it won’t get done. Then, that may fall to you.” The next question is: “Is it really worth doing?” You need to have a sense of priorities. Some of your responsibilities really are your responsibilities—there’s no way to avoid it. Others, you sometimes take on out of a sense of ego—you know you could do it better than somebody else. They may be able to do a perfectly adequate job, but you have a chance to excel. You have to watch out for that. Those are the responsibilities where you have to back off a little bit.

And remember: The phrase we usually use is “fitting the practice into our life”: “How do we fit the practice into the responsibilities we’ve taken on?” A better perspective might be “fitting daily life into our practice.” Accept the fact that your number one responsibility, one that no one else can do for you, is training your mind. No one else can make you virtuous, no one else can make you concentrated, no one else can get you to see everything with discernment, so that when death comes, you’re ready for it. This is a perspective you should always have in mind: Which responsibilities are the ones that, as death approaches, you’ll look back on and be happy you took on? Which ones are really worth it?

Like those clubs they have where people say, “Suppose you had only one year left to live, how would you live your life?” You find a lot of people saying, “Well, I’ll drop this and I’ll drop that,” because you know you have to drop everything, at some point. So keep that perspective in mind.

So, what does it mean to have your daily life fit into your practice? The image I think of is that you have a visual field—the world outside—and you also have the field of your sense of your body as you feel it from within. You want to maintain that sense of your body as you feel it from within regardless of what your activities are and what happens in the visual field. Don’t let the visual field obliterate your sense of the body. That way, you can be practicing and taking on responsibilities at the same time.

At the beginning, it may seem like a lot, but then look at the way your mind actually functions as you go through the day: You’re taking on a responsibility, and yet your mind sometimes wanders here, wanders there in the course of your work. Well, tell yourself, “Those times when you’d ordinarily wander, why don’t you stay with your breath?” You can talk to people and you can deal with things at the same time that you’re coming from within your body. Otherwise, if your attention goes totally out, your sense of the body gets shriveled and your inner sense dies.

It reminds me of an animal I dissected in high school biology class. We were given these enormous grasshoppers. There was a large chart at the front of the room, showing the different organs in the last half of the grasshopper’s body. Well, it so happened that I had a pregnant grasshopper, and she didn’t have any of the organs she was supposed to have. All she had was the eggs, which had squeezed her intestinal system to the point where it was almost non-existent.

In the same way, when we take on the issues of the world and give them our total attention, our sense of the breath inside the body, our sense of our being grounded in the body, gets shriveled away. And in the same way that that pregnant grasshopper was getting ready to die, basically, our sense of our inner core, our inner center, can die if we take on too many responsibilities outside and give them too much of our attention.

So we have to learn how to live in the world but not have the world squeeze our sense of the body out of shape. Try to be fully with the breath whenever you can. Have a sense of the energy you gain this way. As it gives some momentum to your practice, it also gives you energy. Remember the Buddha’s image of concentration as food for all the other qualities you need to develop on the path.

As for which responsibilities you take outside, that’s where you have to develop your own discernment. No one else can tell that to you. They can give some general instructions, but you need to have your own sense of what’s really important in your life.

My older brother, when he first went to graduate business school, took a look at his workload for the first semester and realized it was humanly impossible to do everything that all the professors were demanding of him. So he realized that they were testing his ability to figure out what was important and what was not, because that’s the way life is—there’s too much to do.

You get good at doing one thing, and people pile more responsibilities on you. And if you have pride in taking on responsibilities, you’re finished. You have to decide which kinds of responsibilities require your full attention and demand your full level of skills, and which ones you can allow just to get by. You have to make sure that what’s needed gets done. It may not be with as much finesse as you’d like, but then think of that finesse as taking something away from something else. We have limited amounts of time, limited amounts of energy. The pride that says, “I can handle all responsibilities, I can take on all these duties”: That’s setting you up for a fall.

We have goodwill for all. Our goodwill is unlimited. But our resources are limited, in terms of our generosity. This covers all aspects of the responsibilities you take on—they’re forms of generosity. Give in a way that doesn’t harm you, that doesn’t harm others.

Remember, this is all in the context of the practice. As death approaches, that’s going to be the big question: What have you done to prepare for death?

There was an ad one time in Singapore. They were trying to encourage professional women to step out of their professions or at least take on a family life. In one scene, they had an older woman who had been a successful businesswoman, at home alone, looking through a photo album. What did she have in her photo album? Business cards, rewards, awards—all just pictures and pieces of paper. She was contrasted with another woman who was surrounded by her loving children and grandchildren.

As always in Singapore, the message wasn’t subtle. The problem was that they presented only those two alternatives. Both of those women, when they die, are going to have to depend on their inner resources. You can develop inner resources by doing your job well or by giving love to others, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done if you’re really going to prepare.

Think of what the Buddha said about the acrobats. One acrobat stands on the shoulders of another one, and each of them, he says, has to look out after himself or herself. If they look out after each other, they’re going to lose their balance. But if each one maintains his or her balance, they’re going to come through. In the same way, when you really take care of your mind, you’ll be taking care of others, providing them with a sense of balance, a solid center in this life.

But he also says that by helping others, you develop qualities that are good for you—qualities like goodwill, kindness, equanimity, and endurance. So learn to see that the responsibilities you take on *can *be part of your practice, in terms of the qualities you develop.

But also remember that you want to keep everything in the context of “you, inside the body.” Don’t let your sense of the body get squeezed out like the intestines of that pregnant grasshopper. Fully inhabit your body as much as you can. In that way, everything is in the practice, and daily life does fall into the context of the practice—not the other way around.