...AND MEDITATION IS A metaphor for life. Meditation consists of keeping your mind on one thing. Of course, what happens is your mind drifts onto other things. You notice your mind has drifted, you’re tempted to keep thinking about it, but then you let it go and bring yourself back to your meditation.

Although life is a little more complicated, it is much the same: You notice you’ve gone off the track and you get back on.

You can’t have it all, do it all or be it all. To live happily, you have to narrow your purposes down to a few: certain relationships, certain important values, and a general purpose for your life. Then the world and your own mind/body will continually take you off onto side-trips and distractions. Salespeople, in-laws, your desire for diversions and pleasures and entertainments, advertisers, people who want something from you (like your attention), and many more sources of distraction are constantly coming your way.

So you get off purpose. And then you notice you’ve gone off on a purpose that has nothing to do with what’s important to you, and you let it go and get back to your own purposes.

For example, I was doing some work in my living room one hot summer night and I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Two teenage boys skateboarding by across the street looked in my window and one of them said, “Hey, put on a shirt!” I was being invaded in my own living room. He said it again. It was clearly wrong, and I wanted to go over there and wring their scrawny little necks, or at least call the police, or do something that would show those two punks they can’t get away with that with me! But all of that has nothing to do with my chosen purposes. No real harm was done. It was simply another opportunity to either get off track or let it go and get back to my work.

Make your entire life a meditation. Less of your time will be wasted on things that aren’t important to you and more of your goals will be achieved.