View this world as a hotel 

where we are temporary guests. 

We’ve been advised to view the world as a hotel that we are visiting for a mere few days.

Since our time here is so brief, there’s no point in getting attached to the place. It’s not our home; it doesn’t belong to us. During our visit, we treat the facilities with respect—we keep our rooms clean, use only what we need, don’t bother the other guests, and make sure we leave everything in as good a condition as when we got here, or even better.

Since we’re just visiting, we won’t be taking anything with us because whatever we encounter will remain behind when we leave. If one of the other visitors needs help, we do whatever we can. But we don’t get attached. And we don’t have expectations for the lives of those we help because, being such short-term visitors, we have little time to make much of an impact.

Our plan is that in the future, once we get to our real home, we’ll come back often to truly help all those who are still staying at this hotel. 

We do the right thing not because we expect to change the world . . . (Click image for video)

We practice to accord with the world, 

not to have it conform to our wishes. 

Much of our energy seems directed at trying to get others to comply with our wishes.

We plan and rehearse what we’ll say. Or, utterly frustrated, we just blurt out what it is we want. Upon seeing the other person’s reaction, we frantically devise Plan B. Whatever our scheme, the goal is to get someone to stop doing something their way and start doing it ours. Unsurprisingly, regardless of our strategy, our desired effect invariably remains just that—a desire.

What we’re trying to do is change conditions, and they’re not amenable to a quick fix. A good understanding of causality is necessary to know the correct method to alter them. For now, we need to stop fussing over the barking dog, our midnight music-playing neighbor, the world’s laziest co-worker and stop allowing them to irritate us. Yes, they are annoying. No, they are not life-threatening.

So, let’s view them as tools for our practice of patience, instead of a means of torture.