闲人

A person who thinks that faith is unnecessary is a person who does not recognize all the things he puts faith in blindly.

In the end, some things we need to rely on faith.

We take a course in university, and put faith in the idea that once we finish we will have a good job and all will be well. And sometimes that faith is misplaced, but that's ok.

We seem to have at some point become obsessed with planning. Go to a good primary school, then a good secondary, then a good course in uni, get a good job.

However, any decision made closes off other decisions. The decision to stick to a plan closes off other options. The young Buddha didn't leave his home planning to become a religious icon, Darwin didn't leave home planning to write about evolution. They might even have been unable to achieve what they did if they had a fixed plan in mind to do certain things. What they did is discover something new, and one can only discover something new when one's mind is open.

Plans give security. But one can plan only based on what one knows, and nothing new will come out of it. Faith also gives security. It may be a flimsy false security since faith can be misplaced (though plans are also far from infallible), but it is one that allows for new discoveries.

Which is not to say that one having faith will necessarily discover something new. One might still fail. One might even lose security because of misplaced faith. Yet the spirit of having faith is necessary.

I find it relatively easier to let go of the past than to not worry about the future. The past is, after all, unchangeable, the best you can do is make changes in the present. Perhaps it is also for the same reason that I can't let go of the future. Maybe I am afraid that if I don't make the right choices, my present will become an unchangeable past, leaving future me with a mess to clean up.

Yet fear, as does desire, clouds one's vision. If there is fear, or desire, or any variation that one can think of, it becomes a preoccupation. One's mind is crowded with thoughts of, perhaps, solutions or best/worst case scenarios or ruminations or fantasies. The mind is not free to see things as they are.

One thing that one often fails to see is that sometimes the emotion comes first and then we find a reason to pin on it. Of course there is a reason for the emotion, but sometimes it isn't the one we attribute to it. We have a desire to explain things, and when it comes to our own emotions, we often settle for a reason that makes sense, rather than insist on finding the truth. Sometimes we settle for a reason that doesn't even make sense.

We need to see things as they are, emotions as they are, their causes as they are.