Life is like a playground filled with dozens of children. Depending on where your glance lands, you can see drama, comedy or tragedy. It’s all happening at once, and you’re in the midst of it. Equanimity can be there with you. Look around:
In that corner a little child who’s lost a favorite teddy bear is inconsolable, despite the parent’s frantic efforts to find it. A few yards away are two toddlers who’ve made the magical discovery of each other and are happily sharing a toy.
In another corner, a bully has just punched a younger child in the split second both parents glanced away. The youngster, too young to communicate the resulting distress, must find a way in silence to process the pain, outrage and fear, while the parents grope for a way to make sense of what might have happened.
Barely a stone’s throw from that, another child has just succeeded in climbing all the stairs on the slide and collecting the courage to sit and let go, with a huge smile of delight and triumph all the way down.
If you could see it all happen at once, it would be like taking most of our days and putting them in a kind of mental blender. At any given moment, though, life can be like the experience of any kid on that playground. Then, in the next minute, it can be like some other child’s very different experience.
Most of us would rather have mild ups and downs than a ground up average experience all the time. Some dramas are difficult or long-lasting enough, though, that we resist what we’re feeling and shoot ourselves with the “second arrow” of dukkha – or a series of them.
With equanimity, we can stay with our responses to whatever happens on the busy playground of our lives. It helps if we can take a long view and see how varied what’s going on can be. What we’re feeling now could change in a moment, especially if we let go of the idea that our suffering is caused by external events.
It isn’t even our feelings that constitute dukkha. It’s our aversion to them, our efforts to escape the truth of the moment. Holding a larger perspective and bearing in mind that everything that happens is impermanent can allow us to hold an internal balance underneath the passing delights and disappointments of our lives.