Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

always justified. The present moment is never a new
beginning because we keep it from becoming one.
How else to explain, for example, the all-too-common
observation that two people who have lived their
whole adult lives together, had children together,
tasted success in their own realms to a degree not
usually achieved, might in their later years, when by
all accounts they should be enjoying the fruits of their
labors, each blame the other for making life
miserable, for feeling isolated, trapped in a bad
dream, so mistreated and abused that anger and hurt
are the fabric of each day? Karma. In one form or
another, you see it over and over again in
relationships gone sour or missing something
fundamental from the start, the absence of which
invites sadness, bitterness, hurt. Sooner or later, we
are most likely to reap that which we have sown.
Practice anger and isolation in a relationship for forty
years, and you wind up imprisoned in anger and
isolation. No big surprise. And it is hardly satisfactory
to apportion blame here.
Ultimately, it is our mindlessness that imprisons us.
We get better and better at being out of touch with
the full range of our possibilities, and more and more
stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-
seeing, but only reacting and blaming.