Appreciating What is There

‘Rotate the spine clockwise but the leg anticlockwise..
keep your head pointing 3 ‘o’ clock but arm at 6 ‘o’ clock..
look at the right thumb with the right eye and the left toe with the left eye’

Kwan kept on teaching.. and at the end of the very well conducted class, wiping sweat off her brows, she smiled self satisfactorily..

As the students slowly started to walk towards her after the class, she prepared to modestly take a bow and acknowledge the compliments of the grateful students..
And then they asked, ‘ Teacher.. IS THAT ALL?’

Me and Kwan had a good chuckle over this experience of hers in one of her recent classes.. And i remember myself condescendingly thinking, ‘beginners .. beginners’.
till here all was good, and limited to beginners.

Now a short detour.
Yesterday, being Monday night, i just wanted to laze around in the house. However Sandhya wanted me to lovingly drive her to a dance show in Matic, KL. Though i felt as if all  connective tissues in my body snapped en masse in that second of her request, leaving me with a falling in a heap feeling, i kept up a maitri expression, and agreed.
Finally pulled up in Matic with the benign face still intact.
She gave me one thankful expression, took out the ticket to the show from her bag,  and  exclaimed, ‘Oh, it is not in Matic, but in Museum negara. Can we go there fast? we only have five minutes to the show’.
Then she added as an afterthought, ‘ i am sorry, ok?’.

“Sorry?? Is that all?? Is that all she is going to say? Shouldn’t she reach a bit more deeper into the oven of humility?”,
my mind erupted. Waited for a few more seconds in seething silence, whether she will say something more.. nothing… again my mind goes, ‘so that is all. cant believe it. Is that all?’.. and suddenly amidst all this ‘is that all’ thoughts, i noticed Kwan’s bemused face in my mind..  what is she doing here i think.. and then i remembered the original problem…the ‘IS THAT ALL’ question of Kwan’s student..
now it was my turn to reach deep down and munch on a slice of humble pie, as i realized that the ‘is that all’ is not confined to beginners alone..
Then decided  to observe the mind the rest of the night…
saw the ‘is that all’ or its seed thought, ‘it isn’t enough’  continuously..
at the car park, shouldn’t they have more parking bays? (is that all) ..
in the dance hall, ‘is that all’ to the effort put in by the musicians.. and so on and on
i noticed that as soon as i gave in to this thought, immediately the consciousness got smeared with a sense of unpleasantness.. a sense of falling short of expectation..along with restlessness..
and if i could look over and above this thought, some inherent perfectness in the way things are, could be perceived.. and  could immediately settle into a nice, steady state..
The looking for perfection rather than experiencing something in the way it is..  the scriptures technically points out as a condition of tamasic buddhi.. where, by unfurling a veil of expectation, it distorts the present.. it keeps us never satisfied with ‘what is’ in the moment and keep on seeking another object.. another experience..

We can see this everywhere, even in relationships. Some wives/ husbands say that whatever they do, it seems it ain’t enough, not matching expectation levels. And some are on a quest to satisfy… they say they want to ‘give it all’ to give the satisfaction.. but sometimes what it involves is not ‘give it all’.. but ‘give up all’… people drop their personal interests in pursuit of being the perfect mother, wife etc.. but very rarely is it a solution.. as the problem lies in a particular contraction or distortion of the mind of the perceiver…
So let us all try to tame the mind, and try to appreciate what is here in this moment, rather than fret over what is not here .. you will be surprised at what all you will find which you were missing earlier..

And  to end the story of me and sandhya, as soon as i dropped the ‘is that all’ irritation,, i could see a certain cuteness in what happened.. and once i smiled, her tension also was lost.. we had a good laugh.. and what more, throughout the show, she kept massaging my painful wrist..
And that is all!