The glass is already broken

I used to say –– only half-jokingly –– that when I met an attractive or interesting woman, my imagination immediately fast-forwarded to the point where she told me she couldn't see me anymore because she was getting serious about her other, previously-undisclosed boyfriend, or the scene after the breakup where she's at the bar with her girlfriends telling them all what a bastard I was.

Later, I read a book which quoted the Venerable Ajahn Chah talking about a drinking glass. (This anecdote is told in a slightly different form here.) The gist of Ajahn Chah's comment is, "the glass is already broken."

Literally speaking, the glass isn't broken –– in one version of the anecdote, he's drinking from it. But someday it will be, so why make false assumptions about its permanence? View the glass as if it were already broken, and you have no attachment with which to cope when it actually does break.

Literally speaking, the relationships I visualized weren't over –– they hadn't even begun –– but their eventual end was as inevitable as the broken glass. So why attach to something (or someone) when the end is already in sight?

Nothing is permanent. I own a home for which I paid cash and for which there is no mortgage. I feel fortunate to have that security.

But someday, I'll lose this house. Maybe I'll sell it. Maybe I'll die. Maybe the government will take it from me so a new expressway can be put through. Maybe the taxes will grow so high I won't be able to pay them. Maybe a tornado will demolish it.

In any event, this house is a temporary shelter, not a permanent one. And part of the reason I'm not as obsessive about lawn edging and perfectly rectangular shrubs as my neighbors is that I think it's silly to spend so much of your waking life trying to fastidiously arrange every detail of an existence over which you ultimately have no control.

So the boxwood isn't perfectly square. Is the sun still shining?

My dog ran off. Is the grass still green?

I'm alone. Is the sky still blue?