I'm always remainded of this when I think back to my time early on living in the monastery and one particular situation.
I found myself sitting down for lunch one day.
It's summer. It's outside.
It's really hot, and you only get two meals a day in the monastery.
And there's not a lot of variety as you can imagine,
So food actually becomes quite a big thing.
So when I looked over and saw them handing out ice cream instead of the usual curryed vegetables, I got really excited.
I didn't even see that happening in my mind, actually.
I was so excited I got completely carried away with it.
What I didn't realize was that the person handing out the ice cream was being followed by somebody else who was handing out the usual rice and curried vegetables, and the ice cream was being pushed to the middle of the table, making it very clear that the curry and the rice was to be eaten before the ice cream.
Now in this particular monastery, you had to take about an hour to eat the food, so you're eating incrediably slowly.
And obviously, that meant that the ice cream was just gonna sit there.
So in my mind, I went from a place of real, genuine excitment...
I hadn't seen ice cream for a long time.
...to feeling a little bit confused, a little bit frustrated, and quite anxious as I sat and watched the ice cream melt in the summer sunshine, until eventually, there was just a feeling of ill will in my mind where I really kid of just resented the whole situation.
All I could think about was the story in my mind of the ice cream that could have been.
I eventually came to a place of acceptance and realization that I was never gonna get to the ice cream anyway.
You can look at the story and say, "Well, that's fine. It's just ice cream."
But you could replace the ice cream in that story with anything