麻豆约拍

Good Morning

A well-known coffee company has just put up a billboard at the end of my street. Brightly coloured and six foot high, it proclaims in giant letters 鈥済et today on your side!鈥� My first response was, what a good idea, a cappuccino would really hit the spot. Just what the ad-man intended. Then I noticed that someone had defaced the billboard with a sticker bearing a phone number and the simple word 鈥榤assage!鈥� Hmmm 鈥� now there鈥檚 a choice鈥�
How wonderful if life was as simple as that. Imagine if all the things that we鈥檙e encouraged to consume, whether coffee, intimate massage, clothes, gadgets or cars, could genuinely deliver the happiness and contentment that we seek. In that case, it would make sense that we rush around like ants, earning money and taking out loans in search of an ever-higher standard of living. And the happiest people in society would be the rich and famous, with celebrity magazines full of stories of harmony and contentment instead of drinking, dieting and break-ups.

Instead, all the evidence is that material objects can鈥檛 and don鈥檛 deliver what they promise. So it鈥檚 a puzzle to me how I still continue to be so distracted by them, and to organise my day around them. I know deep down that happiness comes from things that money can鈥檛 buy, such as loving relationships, doing someone a good turn, or suddenly seeing something of beauty. However I seem to need constant reminders that qualities such as kindness, generosity and contentment are more important than what鈥檚 up there on the billboards. That鈥檚 why I鈥檓 so grateful to Buddhism and to the other spiritual traditions, which offer a still small voice of calm among so much noise and madness.

Let鈥檚 pray that each of us can revisit our priorities today, and make careful choices about how we spend our precious energy and time.