Being OK with Everything, Like OK Buddha

  One of the most interesting parables I heard of was of a king who wants to cover the world with grass because he hates walking on the hard ground with bare feet. He is gifted with a pair of slippers. I know that either I am hopelessly mangling the story but the idea I wanted to convey is that wisdom does not try to "change the world". Instead, it learns to meaningfully accommodate and flow with the cause and conditions. And that means having to wrestle with the diversity of voices and images we are bombarded with throughout our lives, such as not feeling good enough and so on.

   When the world makes people feel inadequate, not good enough and so on, there is a tendency to try to fill an imaginary void that we have inside of us. We truly begin to believe we are inadequate, so we need to fill our emptiness. And stopping that means accepting the possibility that others won't see us the way we want to be seen. This is OK. Because the images we are experiencing are only possibilities, only phenomena, and they don't have power over us unless we endow them with such. The 'gift of slippers' or sandals (or whatever) represents the ability we have to calm our minds in the face of the darkest images we have of ourselves--to even embrace the sense of inadequacy we might have as both conventionally real and ultimately unreal. In this way, our anxieties are fleeting and impermanent.