"I remember seeing a poster in a health food store in Santa Cruz in the 1970s of the Hindu guru Swami Shantananda with his long, flowing beard, standing on one leg in a little orange loin cloth in the yogic posture called the tree pose. What was remarkable about this picture was that Swami Shantananda was balanced in the tree pose on top of a surfboard on a really large wave. Underneath, it said in big letters, 'You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.' The spirit of the practice of equanimity and peace is not that the waves will stop, but that our heart and mind become so open and balanced, that we can behold the turning seasons of the world from a place of stillness.
"To find equanimity and peace requires an acceptance of the mystery of life itself. Modern science tells us that a big bang started the universe, hurling matter through space. Some of this matter formed stars, and some of the residue formed the planets. In this way everything on the Earth — stones, frogs, clouds, and our own living bodies — is formed out of the same material that formed the stars and planets. As the cosmologist Brian Swimme says, 'Four and a half billion years ago, the Earth was a flaming molten ball of rock, and now it can sing opera.'
"When you can appreciate your life as part of this unfolding mystery of the immense forces that formed the entire universe, you can more easily accept the difficulties and hardships that you face. They are part of the unfolding of your life. Many of the difficulties you've faced include endings, but none of them so far has been the end of your story. Without knowing the whole story, it is impossible to draw definite conclusions about our difficulties. We are still in the middle of them and don't know how they will turn out.
"Unfortunately, there is no rule book for life. 'Things are uncertain, aren't they?' my teacher Ajahn Chah used to say. To accept this basic uncertainty in life is to find the wisdom of insecurity. When we realize that things are fundamentally uncertain and learn how to relax into this uncertainty, we come to trust in the unfolding of our individual lives within the vastness of all time and space. As Zen master Suzuki Roshi says, 'When you realize the truth that everything changes and find your composure in it, you find yourself in Nirvana.' "
