The 28th lojong slogan, “Abandon any hope of fruition,” is the first one I learned. My teacher had it posted in the room where we spent most of our day. I didn’t like it. It felt, at first, pessimistic and unreasonable. As you can imagine if you read my posts regularly, I see the world as naturally favoring our growth and goodness. Why would we want to abandon that notion?! How does that help?
But over the years, I think I’m getting it. Because some forms of hope can really get us stuck. We can find ourselves in a mind game where we fantasize over how great it will be when X happens. And then life happens, and it almost never happens the same as what we expected or wanted.
Talk about knocking the wind out of your sails.
Traleg Kyabgon says, “Whenever we become obsessed with results, we spend our time trying to manipulate the outcome of our endeavor, instead of paying attention to the activity itself.” Our idealistic imaginings about the future steal our ability to be present in the here and now. And because we tend to do this so strongly, maybe we need these strong words to help us snap out of it. Abandon any hope of fruition.
What if we just gave up on what comes next, on how we want this to turn out, and simply stay faithful to the moment itself?
Norman Fischer explains that projecting forward also messes with our sense of reality. He writes, “My thought of what it is going to be like when I arrive in Mexico is never the same as what it is actually like when I arrive in Mexico, even though I have been to Mexico many times.” Haven’t you had this same experience?! We project reality, and we’re almost always wrong. Maybe we could spend more time in the present and let the future unfold in due time.
It reminds me of when Jesus says, “Do not worry about tomorrow. Today has enough worries of its own.”
Abandoning our false sense of the future helps us get free. It keeps us grounded in the here and now, and in the rightness of the work itself. And when things don’t turn out as we expect, as they inevitably will do, we simply keep going. We’re not here for the results. We’re here because this is our path, and we like walking it.
That’s enough.
