There is no one else like you. We’re all unique, shaped by different experiences—even within the same family. Considering just the birth order of children alone has a profound effect; the first-born meets parents stepping into the unknown, often wrapped in fear or overprotection. The last-born finds parents seasoned, more confident, perhaps freer to let mistakes unfold. Our conditioning carves distinct paths from the very start.
It’s tempting to cast our eyes around, to measure ourselves against others—gauging how far ahead or behind we appear, based solely on what we can see, hear or touch. We pour time and money into questioning whether we’re on the “right” path, aching to know for sure. And when we convince ourselves we’ve strayed, we suffer deeply—as if we could ever be anywhere but exactly where we are!
What if it’s impossible to stray from your path?
Imagine waking up, brewing a hot cup of tea, and truly feeling that this—right now—is what you’re called to do. For most, it’s a fleeting pause before the mind races to “bigger” things. That’s where we lose ourselves. We fixate on grand moments—those rare, fleeting peaks that claim so much of our thoughts, and time—while the small, daily actions slip by unnoticed. Yet those seemingly, insignficiant moments hold the greatest power.
As I write this, I trust the process. This is my path in this moment, I don’t need to worry about where I’m going next. It feels like my whole life has led me here—not because of what this blog might become, but because of what I am doing now. It could flop, gather dust, or be dismissed as trivial by others. That doesn’t matter. The act of writing it is mine, and that’s enough. If we could see more moments this way—the seemingly small acts of brewing tea, walking, breathing, making the bed —we’d start to feel a deep appreciation for life. It becomes magical. Wonder creeps in when we stop chasing something better and simply witness what’s here. It doesn’t mean you stop living life. I still take action, but I’m not trying to escape in my mind to a “better” place. I trust that everything is my path.
There’s a phrase I’ve heard: “You’re not on your own path.” It’s often aimed at someone caught in habits or choices that don’t seem to serve their highest good, and it is usually served up by worried and concerned friends and family. It is however a judgment, an assumption that one person can play God and know what’s best for another— it wrongly assumes that we can just pick a new path like it’s a coat off a rack. I see it differently. Every step you’ve taken is your path: the friends who fed bad habits, the job that broke you down, the extreme sport that pushed your body too far and broke it. Each choice, each stumble, has been a teacher, giving you exactly what you needed to grow, to overcome, to soften, to let go. Believing you’re “off” your path is disempowering—it whispers that you’ve made a wrong turn, that someone else could’ve done it better if they were living your life. No. You’re exactly where you need to be.
This doesn’t mean staying stuck in harmful environments. Being on your path isn’t passive—it’s active, alive. It’s about moving forward without being shackled by limiting beliefs about what’s possible. Trusting your path means seeing every moment as yours, every lesson as necessary, every challenge as an oppprtunity for growth, and every small act as a thread in the tapestry of your life.
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In Buddhism we can find advice on how to live a noble life as we embark on a path towards enlightenment. Regardless of your belief system these teachings can assist in bringing clarity towards your intentions and actions in life and can aid in shifting delusion, ill will and greed by stepping away from egocentric practices. Through this focus one can generate greater compassion and an appreciation for life “as it comes” rather than as “it should be”.
The Buddha talked about Dana (The Perfection of Giving) in relation to the teaching of ‘The Six Paramitas’ or ‘The Six Perfections of Character’ (there are 10 listed in Theravadan Buddhism). The Six Paramitas are the perfection of giving, morality (proper conduct), patience (or tolerance), effort, meditation and wisdom (or discernment) and are to be cultivated if we wish to move away from suffering towards peacefulness and happiness.
Dana : The Generosity of Giving
The Perfection of Giving is considered to be one of the first Paramitas to be developed as it develops the skill of metta (loving-kindness). As we develop greater metta we awaken our hearts furthering unconditional giving and selflessness. It is important to highlight that being the giver and being the receiver are of equal importance in this interaction. The Western awkwardness of “politely” rejecting gifts whether they be material, time, money or work, does not allow for a harmonised experience of giving and receiving. This conditioning of politeness can show us how far our conditioning can throw us from peaceful living. By denying a person the opportunity to give, we deny them the joy of giving and developing their metta further.
Giving and receiving arise as one, you cannot give without having a receiver and you cannot receive without having a giver so both sides must be respected in equal measure.
A personal experience of caring and rearing two wild-born black rats from the age of 1-week old to 6-weeks provided me with my first taste of selfless giving. In their pure innocence and vulnerability of needing to be cared for in order to survive, they gave me my first real taste of selflessness and the pureness and joy of giving.
To be accomplished in The Generosity of Giving can be expected like so:
“What is accomplishment in generosity? Here, a noble disciple dwells at home with a mind free from the stain of miserliness, freely generous, open-handed, delighting in relinquishment, devoted to charity, delighting in giving and sharing. This is called accomplishment in generosity.”
AN 4:61, NDB 450
The Eight Reasons For Giving
The Buddha mentions eight reasons that we may give a gift and these eight reasons can be interpreted as moving from lower levels of awareness filled with greed, delusion and hatred towards higher levels of awareness that bring us closer to our enlightened selves. These are as follows:
1. One gives a gift from desire.
2. One gives a gift from hatred.
3. One gives a gift from delusion.
4. One gives a gift from fear.
5. One gives a gift based in mental conditioning and obligation, thinking, ‘Giving was practiced before by my father and forefathers; I should not abandon this ancient family custom’.
6. One gives a gift in consideration of good kamma in the next life, thinking: ‘Having given this gift, with the breakup of the body, after death, I will be reborn in a good destination, in a heavenly world
7. One gives a gift for the purpose of joy, thinking: ‘When I am giving this gift my mind becomes placid, and elation and joy arise.’
8. One gives a gift for the purpose of ornamenting or beautifying the mind and increasing the skill of metta.
As you move down the list of reasons for giving, the giver becomes less and less identified with themselves as an individual needing to accomplish something in life and more in tune with the wholesomeness of the practice where the giver and receiver are one. As we develop this practice we move away from expecting outcomes from our gift giving realising that the act of giving is to let go of the ego rather than to fuel it further.
The next time you find yourself involved in the act of giving, give yourself the opportunity to reflect before, during and after on the above points. Perhaps you can identify the intention behind your gift giving based on one or more of the points. Where possible avoid rational thinking and reasoning from taking charge and instead be aware that this action is resulting in mental proliferation (trying to “figure it all out”). Be aware that the act of giving felt like this and trust in the present moment awareness where no action is needed to be taken and the awareness itself is all that’s needed.
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How does each of us relate to our environment? More often, through formal channels such as the news, or simply with our friends we speak of how we relate to society; talking of the interdependent relationship we have with the environment is more a special moment chat when the stars have aligned, Saturn is waxing, the Moon has risen in Mercury and a black hole has swallowed Elon Musk’s Starlink.
From my own experience and observation, how much more important it seems to each of us to deal with the immediate aspects of our life, work, romance, food shops, keeping ourselves entertained. We critique the government, our bosses and authority and declare that we “can do a better job!”. Gossiping on the comings and goings of the lives of our co-workers and friends take up endless hours of time. We realise at some level that we are a small cog in our society and we fulfill our cogly-role of selecting a job enabled by the government, consuming everything we want and need, and giving voice from the sidelines on how our lives could be lived better if x, y and z changed, with never walking onto the field to participate in the game of life. But how often do we really consider that we are also an even smaller cog in an even bigger “machine” of the Mother Earth and that every one of our actions influences our environment? How insignificant our lives then appear to be, in fact, so insignificant that we go back to burying ourselves in alcohol, drugs and dopamine-inducing entertainment.
Until recently, I did not spend all that much time contemplating such things. I didn’t have my head totally buried in the sand; I sorted my recycling, I made sure to never burn plastics or harmful materials on garden bonfires, I enjoyed being out in nature and I didn’t fulfill my role of being a consumer all that well. Yet there was a marked disconnect within myself that I could feel, but not quite explain.
I have found that you can watch the entire collection of David Attenborough’s, you can study Zoology at university, read countless books on natural history or even go to a zoo and you will still not understand nature to the same depth than if you were to sit outside and simply watch. In fact, I’ve found the less you know about an animal and it’s habits, the more connected your experience as you tune in at a deeper level to what it’s doing. Once you’ve associated a behaviour you’ve watched from a documentary to an animal, you now assume you now know what it’s doing, now you stop paying attention. This is not to say that there isn’t validity to nature documentaries but they are merely a band-aid to keeping us slightly connected to what’s going on in the natural world. When I first got here I didn’t pay such close attention, birds flew past but they all flew the same. Not until I started paying attention did I notice, with enthusiasm, that the crane extends it’s legs some time before landing much like a plane deploying it’s landing gear on a run up to the runway, sometimes dipping it’s toes into the water; or drongos that seemingly perform Red Arrows style flying maneuvers with barrel rolls and loop-the-loops whenever they take flight (I sometimes think they would get where they’re going a hell of a lot faster if they just cut that out all together); or house martins flying against stormy winds tack across the sky like boats battling waves.
A few weeks ago I discovered with my mum, two mist nets at the bottom of our garden, on the other side of our wall. These are used to catch birds. Made of fine netting strung up between two poles (thing of a volleyball net), the birds blind to it, fly straight in and become ensnared by the net. A menagerie of birds had already been caught and hung there, alive, yet immobile. It was a horrifying and sickening sight, it reminded me of tiny corpses being strung up to ward off any other dissenters. For a while we ourselves were immobile. What should we do? Every cell was screaming we should cut them free and release them, it was cruel and barbaric, this is no way to treat animals but the conditioning of society quietly crept in. The net isn’t on our land, we are foreigners in this country and shouldn’t involve ourselves with the locals business, maybe this person is struggling to come by food in this lock-down, maybe they have a family to feed.
After much too-ing and fro-ing we released the one bird we could, a young zebra dove (one of its parents and sibling were also caught in the net) that hung lower and closer to our wall than the rest. Our hands shook as we worked to cut the netting away. The entire time it remained totally calm and I could feel it’s heart beating slowly, far slower than mine that was racing, afraid the person would return and catch us in the act. For a few precious moments I held the zebra dove in my hand until it seemingly felt ready to leave, broke through my light grasp and took off. It was some hours later that a man showed up to remove the birds and we politely asked him to remove the net, which he graciously obliged.
It was very distressing to see the birds caught in the net and yet the man could not be blamed for what he was doing, in fact he handled all the birds very softly as he removed them from the net and placed them in a sack. He was doing what he could do best to survive with the tools and conditioning he had available to him. These sorts of behaviours cannot be pinned on a certain type of person, a community or a nation, it lies in each and every one of us with our lifestyles, our spending habits, the fact that we have spending habits and our incessant desires that we have no awareness or control over. When we can’t control how products are made and disposed of, how natural resources are harvested, government policies and greater societal cogs, the one thing we can control is ourselves. The more we can still our minds, ease our egos and desires, the more possibility there is for the likes of circular economies to exist, advanced communes, reduced pollution and sustainable co-existence with the environment. The only reason we’re not there yet is because we’re not ready to be there.
I for one think product design should include how the item will be dealt with once its finished with; do existing recycling methods allow for it to be recycled or do new methods need to be created. If a new recycling method needs to be created then a company should pay into a “pot” to create the new technology to deal with this. I feel the nuclear energy industry sums this up nicely – let’s create an energy that requires minimal resource and creates “only” steam as a by-product (sounds like the perfect source of energy), however in terms of dealing with radiated waste, let’s stick it in containers for now and work out how to deal with it later (are you mad?), now apply that scenario to your smartphone, your tablet, your fashionable trainers, your fridge. A zero waste economy (or as close as) would mean everything made serves a function of the highest order and can be reused, recycled or repurposed. This self-realisation on how society and the economy could better operate starts with me and know I am only at the start of this journey.
The poor who live hand-to-mouth have not the livelihood to protect the planet. Those who live in comfort chase desire for money, status and power and have not the self-control to save the planet. The rich, consumed by their greed have not the purity of soul to safe-guard the planet. Those who have stilled their mind and desires have the serenity to rescue Mother Earth. And yet, there are so few.
If you want to save/fix the world, save/fix yourself.
TheForceOfDao 