Right Effort That's Right for Me

Lately, I've been taking the time to appreciate what I have and wher e I am in life.  I've certainly had a charmed life, being born to two wonderful, loving, and stable parents who raised me morally and with a great education.  I never wanted for anything.  I'm certainly in the very top percentile in terms of starting out with opportunity.  The question to keep posing to myself is if I'm making the "right" use of it.  The challenge comes in definitely what "right" is for me and then acting on it.

Much of finding this definition of "right" and the opportunity to act on it passes passively, meaning that we did not explicitly decide to eliminate certain options, they were eliminated due to our own inaction.  I remember the first time realizing that a door was closed to me.  Sitting in a high school art class, watching the Winter Olympics, it occurred to me that several of the medalists were younger than I was, and had started as children.  Anyway, it never occurred to me until that moment that winning all sports in the Olympics wasn't an option to me.  I still figured that I could do anything.  Though now, my body already had ruts and I had already missed out on years of important training needed to prepare me for such high level success.  It's when Virgil's idea "Optima dies, prima fugit." (the best days are the first to flee) occurred to me long before I knew the words.

Over the years, many other opportunities passively passed me by, and that's ok as I've learned to let go of ambition and see more to be "of use".  In Buddha Is As Buddha Does by the Lama Surya Das, he relates a quote by a forest monk from Thailand, "In Asia, the class sequence of the teachings and practice is first generosity, then morality, and then meditation…. But here in the United States, the sequence seems to be meditation first, then morality, and after some time, as a kind of appendix, there is some teaching about generosity."  This strikes me as huge, since I spend more time focusing on meditation and mindfulness, than on anything else.  In some ways, this is highly self-serving, though I always convince myself that I need to bring my best self to any situation, and that I have a long way to go in the realm of mindfulness.  This year, I aim intentionally to change my focus from self-service to world service. 

Though given all of the ways of possibly serving, I need to discover the right way to do that for me.  There are more charities in the world than I have pennies to my name, and trying to spread the pennies evenly wouldn't do any good.  Value comes when I can focus my resources--time, money, energy--into the things that really matter to me, while striving to ensure that all of my acts are wholesome. 

Somewhere in my life I heard or read the concept that men are typically generous toward loved ones, family, friends, and people that they know, while women tend to be more generous to the world at large.  I cannot recall the source of this, nor do I have evidence to back it up, though I feel that for me, it is certainly easier for me to be generous with those whom I know.  Perhaps that it is focus that I've passively "chosen".  More now, I aim to spread my attention outward. 

Nearly 2 years ago, I focused on Why I Blog and identified goals of sharing, a primary one being not resting until others are free of suffering, as in the Bodhisattva vow.  My way is in helping others be more mindful.   Recently, I've teamed up with others who share this goal, we call ourselves Stark Raving Bits, to create daytender, a web site for helping to cultivate mindfulness in others.