Spilled Water Does Not Look

“The spilled water does not look before flowing, and cannot be retrieved easily.”

In this quote, most people would view water spilling as a bad thing, but at most it is an inevitable, unintentional event.  What this means is that events will definitely occur that we don’t wish for, so rather than expect that nothing bad will ever happen, we should know that they will, but that they are not necessarily bad.  Things will happen.  Furthermore, the nature of water is that when spilled, it does not look first, it just spills.

Before I go off too much on a tangent, let us talk about the second half of the quote.  Spilled water can be retrieved, but not easily, not cleanly, and it is generally considered to be very hard to change the past.  What happened has happened, we can do something about it, try to change it, but happened and we will remember that it happened, or others will.  Knowing this, we should not worry or get overly upset, just clean up the spill and carry on.  Worrying causes stress.  When worrying think, “can I do something about this?”  If the answer is yes, do something about it.  If the answer is no, then stop worrying.

When something happens that we think is bad, we should not be so quick to judge.  Often it is not a bad thing, it may just seem that way at first.  We spill water, seems bad.  It takes us 5 minutes to clean it up, then we find out later we missed a bad accident by 5 minutes on a portion of road we would have been on, now the spilled water seems like a good event.  Perhaps later we find out someone we know was hurt in the accident, and it seems bad.  Later we find out the injured person does not have to go to war now because they are injured, and the accident seems good.

We should not expect good things to come from seemingly bad events, or vice versa, but it does happen.  What does this all mean?  Should I expect the best or worst?  To me that is a personal preference.  I can advise this however:  Just do not be attached to your expectations.  I personally don’t expect anything at all, but I hope for the best.  When something good happens we should be happy.  When something bad happens, we do not have to be happy about it.  We will react, that is normal.  We should just try to not overreact and feel that the “bad thing” is horrible or that it means many other bad things will happen.  It just is.  We can at least enjoy the fact that this unfortunate roller-coaster of emotions is what makes us feel alive, and we may just want to smooth out the curves a little so the highs and lows are not so extreme.

There are inevitabilities in everyday life.  Everything is transient, impermanent.  When we accept this as truth, we will not be as hurt by the inevitable.  People will die, animals and flowers will die, we will die.  We can know this, though we may not know what happens then or afterwards.  Yes, this is sad, and we will truly miss those that pass.  We do not have to feel ready to die now, we may never feel ready, but knowing it is inevitable may make us try to achieve greater things while we are here.

We may want to spend more time with those we love and realize what is truly important in this life while we are here.  That is the part that is not pessimistic or optimistic.  It just is, and knowing the impermanence of everything should help us learn to cherish every moment we have with everything.  This is the beauty of truth.