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Are you working hard on the WRONG things?
Yesterday I was reading this Zen story…
Rinzai was a great Zen master in Japan.
One day when he got up in the morning, he told his disciple who was standing by…
“I will narrate a dream I saw last night if you explain what it means.”
His disciple said…
“Please wait for a couple of minutes.
I shall first bring water for you to wash your face and hands.”
The disciple brought the water.
Rinzai washed his face and hands and smiled.
By that time another disciple had come.
Rinzai said…
“I had a dream last night. I was going to tell the dream to this first disciple, asking him to define it. But he defined it before I told him.
Will you define it? Shall I tell it to you?”
The other disciple said…
“Kindly wait a minute, let me first bring a cup of tea for you and then we will see.”
After drinking the tea, Rinzai laughed and said…
“I am very pleased, now there is no need to tell you my dream.”
There was yet another person present who was watching all this. He thought there was no limit to the foolishness.
He said…
“There is a limit to everything. The dream has not even been told and the definitions have already been made, and everything is solved.”
He requested Rinzai to at least narrate the dream, so one could know what the dream was.
Rinzai said…
“I was testing my disciples. Had they shown any readiness to define the dream I would have thrown them out of the monastery.
It was a dream and the matter is over.
This first one did the right thing.
He was saying…
“There is still some shadow of the dream lurking, so just wash your face with cold water”
This second one also did the right thing:
“Perhaps the washing of your face was not enough, the dream is still lurking hazily in the mind, so have a cup of hot tea and wake up!
Just wake up and a dream becomes meaningless.
What is there to define in it?
No one ever bothers to define what is meaningless.”
I won’t go into the spiritual lessons behind this story.
That’s your own journey.
And I wouldn’t get stuck in the argument of whether dreams are meaningful or meaningless.
Beauty of our lives is we get to decide what’s meaningful or meaningless to us.
The question I’d reflect on:
In life and business…
Am I wasting my time defining, chasing, or working on meaningless things?
That’s it for today.
Signing off…
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