Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye. My friend Sheila is deeply passionate about current events. She is terribly upset about the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, the shootings in Texas and Buffalo, and don't even get her started on politics.
I just watched her get really angry with Maria, who thought the situation with Ukraine wasn't so much a war as a two-day attack that came and went; she had no idea. She didn't even hear about the shootings in Buffalo, but boy is she mortified that 72 billion land animals are being slaughtered for human consumption each year. It all feels very important depending on perspective.
A third friend in the room reluctantly admitted that he just heard about what happened in Texas a couple of days ago, he had no idea we were killing that many animals for food, and he wouldn't be able to find Ukraine on a map if you paid him to. He said, "I'm too busy worried about what's happening in my own home." That's when Sheila and Maria looked at Rodney and yelled: This planet IS your home! And we all laughed at the absurdity of fighting over who cares more about what.
Before I turned 40, everything was in focus, but seemingly overnight I needed glasses to clearly see things up close. Five years later, everything is blurry without a proper prescription. Buddhism, as I understand it, offers the bifocals we all need to keep things in focus. According to the Buddha, the moment we see the tree in front of us as somehow separate from us, we've lost perspective.
Think about how it felt like a really big deal when you were five years old and didn't get the toy you wanted for your birthday, or when you were in middle school and didn't get picked for dodgeball, when you were in high school and didn't get noticed by the heartthrob on campus, when you were in college and didn't get the financial aid you felt deserved, two years ago at your job when the promotion went to someone else,
or last week at the restaurant when they didn't put the dressing on the side. It all felt very important at the time. Perspective brings order into our lives, and a lack of perspective causes disorder. It's important not to miss the trees for the forest, nor the forest for the trees. While we sometimes need to zoom-in on microaggressions in order to bring them to light, we also need to zoom-out every once in a while and see this beautiful planet from space.
Life is a buffet of information, and if you want the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference, then pause for a moment, stop adding more to an already overflowing plate, sit down, and chew your food. It's not an eating competition, and there is no prize for consuming more than others. We are not five years old anymore.
We are not in middle school. We can be happy in a world that is already broken, and we can have inner-peace in the midst of chaos. If you find value in the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast and you appreciate as much as I do the fact that this podcast does not have any sponsors, commercials, or ads, it's all thanks to listeners like you who show their support with as little as $1 a month through Patreon.com/BuddhistBootCamp I truly couldn't do this without you. How's that for perspective?
Thank you for making this possible. I appreciate you. Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless and Buddhist Boot Camp. For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com, where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project, watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list. We hope you have enjoyed this episode and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions.
Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏🏼