Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Life is ups and downs constantly.

When you’re on the way up, you jump around happily. When you’re down, you lie on bed feeling close to death.

That is normal, but no one feels normal, especially when they go down. In addition, everyone will agree with me that your tough days are much more numerous than your easy days. Say, marriage, the peak of marriage life is the wedding celebration and the honeymoon. From the peak, you can’t go any higher and can only go down. Two persons living together may have all kinds of problems very quickly and these problems come in long series – one gives birth to the next, each problem is a mother of a long chain of childrens, and each child soon becomes a mother too. Problems can spread with a geometric progression aka exponential growth.

Remember the story of the King playing chess with his Chancellor? The King tells the Chancellor: “You have been very good to me for years and years. I want to give you something. Ask me anything and I will give you.” The Chancellor says, “I just want a little rice. This chessboard has 64 squares. I want the first square to have 1 rice grain, the second square you double it to 2 grains, the third square you double it to 4 grains, and continue doubling like that with each new square until you reach the 64th square.” The King says, “That’s all? Woud it be enough to cook a pot of porridge.” The Chancellor says, “Yes, it would be good for some serious porridge. But you may want your mathematician to calculate how many grains you need to hand over to me first.” The King calls his mathematician in to do the math. It takes the King’s mathematician a while to come up with the answer: “My King, you will give Mr. Chancellor a total of (2^{64} – 1), which is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice.”

This number is so large that by today standard it’s more than the global production of rice in many years!

Our problems in life have the tendency to grow exponentially. Goodluck doesn’t have that tendency, because when you have goodluck you enjoy it for a couple of days and you forget it. But when you have badluck you stress for weeks, or months, or years and feed your badlucks with your stress as food, for the family of badlucks to grow exponentially.

Thus, we don’t want to be stressed by anything for too long. The masters always focus on telling us to be serene always – whatever comes and goes our heart always be calm.

Train the heart to be calm with everything, good or bad.

Practice Zen, practice praying, or both.

There is a very serious need for us to stay calm all the time.

With compassion,

Hoành

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Trần Đình Hoành
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