Practice like Your Hair’s on Fire

Gelek Rimpoche

(2)

  Why haven’t we been able to achieve that yet? Why haven’t we fulfilled our mission? Because we don’t yet realize how important this life is. We don’t realize the limitless capacity of our human body and mind, and how difficult it is to find. We don’t have a sense of urgency because we don’t realize how easily this human life can be lost. Instead, we keep ourselves busy chasing after happiness and running away from suffering, life after life.

  Many of us complain, “I have no time.” I like to call that a good, fancy, stylish excuse. Everybody likes to say, “I’m too busy,” because everybody would like to seem important. It is a great excuse that offers several benefits: you can avoid what you don’t want to do; it gives you a showbiz idea of being important; and all the important people do it, so you can include yourself with them.

  I refer to that as busy laziness. We experience this kind of laziness because we have a problem recognizing our real priorities. Even if we have time, we put the most important thing in our life—our spiritual development—on the back burner. Our laziness is well suited to these upside-down priorities. The sense of urgency becomes a monetary issue for us, because we live in an age where we have to pay our bills for every little thing we need. If we don’t pay our bills then not only will the bill collectors chase us, but even our electricity and water will eventually be shut off.

  As spiritual practitioners, we need to balance our priorities. This means being able to balance the needs of this particular life with our long-term spiritual goals. Of course we have to manage our bills and make sure we have a place to live and food to eat. And we have to meet our responsibilities to our friends and family. But we also need to make our spiritual work a priority. If we can balance that, we are intelligent and capable. If we cannot, we are just the opposite.