Apples, pumpkins, peppers, and cucumbers. The garden is slowing down. The fridge is full of vegetables and the leaves are coming off the trees. Harvest time. I love this time of year, I really do. The amazing tastes of foods and the thrilling colors of nature. To me, fall is the maturity of the love of summer. The graduation of all the effort. It is sublime.
You may not garden, but you harvest something. We all do. Everyday we harvest the results of our actions. A farmer plants a field with beans. She cares for them well. She does all the right things. But, insects destroy much of the crops, and the farmer only harvests one quarter of the beans she expected to. Is she a failure as a farmer? No. She did all that the best farmers would do. The insects destroying her crops was out of her control. Her actions were of her best ability, and the results were less than the best.
We must do our best everyday. No doubt this is work, hard work. But if we do the best we can in everyday actions, and we know we did our best, then we can free ourselves from the results of those actions, good or bad. We are responsible for our actions, but not the result of our actions.
The next time something doesn't turn out as you planned, resist the temptation to feel as if you failed. On the same note, when something goes exceptionally well, resist the temptation to feel that you are the best! Why? Because, it would be better for your understanding of self to have a true view of the situation. You only had control over the actions, the results were affected by many things out of your control. So, good or bad, consider the actions, not the results.
Yoga affords us a chance to practice this way of seeing things. As we practice asana on the mat we find limits, and everyone's limits are different. One person may master a pose on the first try, another may struggle with the same pose for years and not master it. Does this mean that one is more adept at yoga than the
other? No, not at all. With time, the practice of yoga teaches us that the rewards of yoga come from the learning process, not the mastering of poses. It is the very action of learning yoga that grants us growth, and health, and peace of mind, not the the result of pose perfection.
We gain from the action, not the result.
Huckleberry Mathew Ingles
