When you are not afraid to forget who you are, life in the kitchen, or life in the office, might contain huge and overwhelming happiness. Everything you look at, the door, the walls meeting in the corner of the room, the light shining on the cell phone, might be so alive that it looks back. Other people might not be who you thought they were.

They sit on a bench and watch. He can see that the children like finding Easter eggs. The children don’t have opinions about affairs, and they don’t think about what should be happening. They do want their father not to abandon them for the sake of his fiction that his wife should be someone other than who she is. His opinions about his wife are

My mother, the doctor thought, was waiting for my arrival and might not last the night. “Dying of what?” I asked him. “Nothing, everything.”

and more interesting. If this koan has chosen you, or called to you, it naturally belongs with certain other questions, deep questions, which then become yours. What happens to me when I die? What happens to me when those I love die? When someone has died are they alive in my mind or dead? In what way are they still alive and in what way not? And

Most of the time there is a gap between the life we know is possible and the one we live. That gap appears as restlessness, pain, longing, fear, irredeemable loneliness, your skin crawling—some uncomfortable state.

That is also part of compassion’s action in the night; you can’t be sure that what is happening is a mistake. You might find an unsuspected kindness in odd corners of an event or in yourself. If you are busy thinking that you should be kind, you might miss the reality that kindness is already present, in you.

Sometimes it is helpful to think of maps as stories, fictions, artworks. Making up stories doesn’t seem avoidable. Stories just appear in the mind, bidden or unbidden, like the sight of a tree when you round a bend. There is nothing wrong with making things up. You blame yourself, you blame other people, you guess at reasons—these are examples of

With koans a creative leap is more like one, two, three, four . . . rhinoceros. What if happiness were a creative activity, like writing a poem? You cannot know where the next line of a poem will come from and you can’t force it, yet there is a discipline that helps. When you attend in the right way, the poem’s next line really does arrive out of

that he was dreaming. Behind his forehead he had a mesh screen, a mind screen, and the whole war with its desperation, anguish, noise, and loss was a film projected onto that screen. He gazed at the screen in wonder and relief. Instead of being a victim, he had become an art critic.