Seeing Clearly
You Write Your Own Life
A 5-minute read
No amount of wishing makes a stone float. And no amount of wishing lives your life for you.
A village leader once came to the teacher with a hopeful question. When someone dies, he asked, can the right prayers and rituals send them somewhere better — can we chant a good person’s fate into being? The teacher didn’t answer directly. He asked a question back.
Suppose, he said, a man threw a heavy stone into a deep lake. And suppose a whole crowd gathered on the shore and prayed with all their hearts: “Rise, stone! Float! Come up to the surface!” Would the stone float? Of course not, said the man. Stones sink. That’s what stones do. No amount of chanting changes it.
And suppose, the teacher went on, someone poured a jar of oil onto the lake, and the crowd prayed the opposite: “Sink, oil! Go down!” Would it sink? No — oil rises. It rises on its own nature, no matter what anyone wishes over it.
Your life follows your actions the way the stone follows its weight and the oil follows its lightness. Quietly. Reliably. Whatever anyone chants over the top.
This can sound severe at first, but read it again and it’s actually the most freeing idea in the whole module. It means your life isn’t being decided somewhere above your head — by luck, by fate, by other people’s opinions of you, by some verdict you have no say in. The pattern your life follows is being drawn, day by day, by what you actually do. You’re holding the pen.
That’s a weight, yes. You can’t outsource your life to a wish or blame it all on the weather. But it’s also enormous good news, because it puts the one thing that matters back in reach: not what happens to you, which you can’t fully control, but what you do next, which you almost always can.
So the question stops being “why is this happening to me?” and becomes, more usefully, “given this, what will I do?” Different question. Different life.
Pick one pattern in your life you’re unhappy with. Is it happening to you, or partly through your own choices?
Be fair to yourself — some things really are outside your hands. But look honestly for the part that’s holding the pen.
Take a breath. There's no rush to the next page.
Where this comes from
From “You Write Your Own Life,” based on the Asibandhakaputta Sutta (the parable of the stone and the oil). Reframed as agency rather than cosmology.