Peace of mind Once Buddha was walking from one town to another town with a few of his follower

s. This was in the initial days. While they were travelling, they happened to pa ss a lake. They stopped there and Buddha told one of his disciples, ?I am thirst y. Do get me some water from that lake there.? The disciple walked up to the lake. When he reached it, he noticed that some peo ple were washing clothes in the water and, right at that moment, a bullock cart started crossing through the lake. As a result, the water became very muddy, ver y turbid. The disciple thought, ?How can I give this muddy water to Buddha to dr ink!? So he came back and told Buddha, ?The water in there is very muddy. I don? t think it is fit to drink.? After about half an hour, again Buddha asked the same disciple to go back to the lake and get him some water to drink. The disciple obediently went back to the lake. This time he found that the lake had absolutely clear water in it. The mud had settled down and the water above it looked fit to be had. So he collected s ome water in a pot and brought it to Buddha. Buddha looked at the water, and then he looked up at the disciple and said, ?See what you did to make the water clean. You let it be ... and the mud settled dow n on its own ? and you got clear water... Your mind is also like that. When it i s disturbed, just let it be. Give it a little time. It will settle down on its o wn. You don?t have to put in any effort to calm it down. It will happen. It is e ffortless.? What did Buddha emphasize here? He said, ?It is effortless.? Having 'peace of mi nd' is not a strenuous job; it is an effortless process. When there is peace ins ide you, that peace permeates to the outside. It spreads around you and in the e nvironment, such that people around start feeling that peace and grace. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------Jumping the queue Today, a true tale of heroism that takes place not in a war zone, nor a hospital , but in Victoria station in London in 2007, during a tube strike. Our hero ? a transport journalist and self-described "big, stocky bloke with a shaven head" n amed Gareth Edwards, who first wrote about this experience on the community blog metafilter.com ? is standing with other commuters in a long, snaking line for a bus, when a smartly dressed businessman blatantly cuts in line behind him. (Beh ind him: this detail matters.) The interloper proves immune to polite remonstration, whereupon Edwards is seize d by a magnificent idea. He turns to the elderly woman standing behind the queue -jumper, and asks her if she'd like to go ahead of him. She accepts, so he asks the person behind her, and the next person, and the next ? until 60 or 70 people have moved ahead, Edwards and the seething queue-jumper shuffling further backw ards all the time. The bus finally pulls up, and Edwards hears a shout from the front of the line. It's the elderly woman, addressing him: "Young man! Do you wa nt to go in front of me?" Two frogs in the milk This is the story of two frogs. One frog was fat and the other skinny. One day, while searching for food, they inadvertently jumped into a vat of milk. They cou ldn't get out, as the sides were too slippery, so they were just swimming around . The fat frog said to the skinny frog, "Brother frog, there's no use paddling any longer. We're just going to drown, so we might as well give up." The skinny fro g replied, "Hold on brother, keep paddling. Somebody will get us out." And they continued paddling for hours. After a while, the fat frog said, "Brother frog, there's no use. I'm becoming ve

ry tired now. I'm just going to stop paddling and drown. It's Sunday and nobody' s working. We're doomed. There's no possible way out of here." But the skinny fr og said, "Keep trying. Keep paddling. Something will happen, keep paddling." Ano ther couple of hours passed. The fat frog said, "I can't go on any longer. There's no sense in doing it becau se we're going to drown anyway. What's the use?" And the fat frog stopped. He ga ve up. And he drowned in the milk. But the skinny frog kept on paddling. Ten minutes later, the skinny frog felt something solid beneath his feet. He had churned the milk into butter and he hopped out of the vat.