"What is my job on the planet?" is one question we might do well to ask ourselves over and over again. Otherwise, we may wind up doing somebody else's job and not even know it. And what's more, that somebody else might be a figment of our own imagination, and maybe a prisoner of it as well.

Most of the time, if you're not really paying attention, you're someplace else. So your child might say, "Daddy, I want this," and you might say, "Just a minute, I'm busy." Now that's no big deal-we all get busy, and kids frequently ask for attention. But over your child's entire youth, you may have an enormous number of such moments to be really, fully present, but because you thought you were busy, you didn't see the opportunities these moments presented. . . . People carry around an enormous amount of grief because they missed the little things.

You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.

It is a form of violence, to not see a being for who he or she really is. You think, "Oh, that's my son." But the lens, "my son," completely obliterates the multi- dimensions of that being. Maybe you only see your disappointments in that child, or you aspirations for that child, but that's not the child.

"Resting in awareness" is one of those phrases used a lot by people who practice mindfulness. But when I tried to do it, it wasn't restful and I worried I wasn't doing it right. I kept thinking about work.

You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.

Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way.