Just tell me about how you understand patience. Growing your capacity to hold discomfort. Do you think that that as a general capacity as weakened? And I’m thinking of something you wrote that I think about a lot. You wrote: “Refraining is very much the method of becoming a dharmic person. … It’s a practice of not immediately filling up space just because there’s a gap.” And we didn’t use to have the ability to fill the space of every gap. – Yeah. – You were sitting in traffic and there wasn’t a lot to do. You were in line at the supermarket and there was nothing really to look at. Just the daily necessity of sitting with boredom even has dissolved. And I think it changes us. It’s so true. And not for the better, I would say. Less in touch with the richness of the world. Sometimes with students, very often these days, I really encourage them to go to the grocery store, offline; ride on the subway, offline. Be there fully for what’s happening because you’re not engrossed in a movie or a podcast or anything. Let’s not get crazy here. – And put you out of business, Ezra. I mean, the subway is such a great example. There’s so much happening. I mean, I sometimes think you wish weren’t happening. One thing I’ve been trying to do for the last month or so is just do nothing on the subway and just —— – Yeah. – be aware of what’s happening around me. And it’s interesting because a lot of the times I don’t really love what’s happening around me. It’s a rich experience, but, it’s a boom box. It’s the screeching of the brakes. There’s just a lot going on, and dropping the effort of trying to find exactly the right music or podcast or thing on my Kindle to distract myself in the right way. It’s easier to stop. That’s been my big lesson from it. It’s not so much that I love every moment on the subway, but I didn’t quite notice how much energy I was expending trying to block it all out. I would call that a form of meditation. It’s interesting because we didn’t use to have all these devices. I grew up before television, even so. But now that we have the devices, it’s very helpful, actually, to feel the contrast. If you didn’t have anything that drew your attention away, it’s not quite as rich as the contrast between being caught up in your devices and being on the subway with nothing happening. You could say, well, that’s when you get into being bored, but you could also say, Pema, but maybe that’s when you get into being alive.
