You Get to Choose

Close your eyes and watch your breath. Notice where you feel the breath and watch that spot as the breath comes in, as the breath goes out. Again and again and again. Try to make the breath comfortable so that it’s a good place to stay. If the mind wanders off, just bring it back. Wanders off again? Bring it back again. Show it that you mean business.

You’ve got to get some control over your mind. We’re born into this world, and sometimes we ask, “Well why are we born?” The answer is, you can decide what you want to get out of this life. We know that life is going to be short. A hundred years is considered long, but when it’s over, it seems very short.

In the meantime, what kind of good qualities are you going to develop that you can take with you when you go—and that you can use while you’re here. Those are things you want to focus on. Which means you have to get some control over your mind so that when you make up your mind to do something, you can really stick with it.

This quality is called determination. It requires that you have one overriding desire, or two or three desires that work together, for your own well-being, for the well-being of the people around you. As for anything else that comes up in the mind, you’ve got to learn how to say No.

The mind is like a committee, and we know what committees are like. Someone once said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Some things go into a committee, and they come out very strange. So you want to make sure that your original intention is maintained: that you want to do good. You want to develop good qualities in the mind like mindfulness, concentration, discernment, goodwill, compassion, wisdom. These things require work. They don’t just happen on their own, which means that you’ve got to make up your mind to develop the qualities that can say No to unskillful desires and encourage you in skillful ones.

Learn how to talk to yourself so that when you’ve made up your mind to do something good, you stick with that intention. This is why concentration practice requires that you talk to yourself first. Talk to yourself about the breath, about why it’s a good thing to focus here. It’s the force of life. If the breath is uncomfortable, then something’s wrong with the force of life. You’ve got to change.

But the important thing about the breath is that you can change. It is responsive. So you work with the breath to make it comfortable so that this is a good place to stay. This is also a good place for you to consider: What exactly do you want out of your life? Here we are born as human beings; we wanted to be human beings. We may not know what purpose we had at the time, but we can make up our minds that we want to make sure it’s a good purpose as we carry on.

So try to get the mind still with the breath. Then, when you come from that sense of stillness and well-being, it’s a lot easier to make the right choices and to stick with them. That way, you can provide your own answer to the question what is life for—what is it about—in a way that really does accomplish some good for you and for the world around you.