This morning, as I lay awake in my bed, I wondered the conditions that would make it possible to sleep in peace. It’s not as if I allot a lot of my life to sleep, or that it comes easily to me anyway, but to have sleep ruined because I ate some pumpkin pie for dessert a little too close to the time I went to bed (three hours or so) is more than a little irksome. Nevertheless, the fact that this is the second time in a week or so where my poor stomach has been thrown for a loop by pumpkin pie suggests that the food will have to be avoided in the future until I can figure out why I am reacting so badly to it. Given my generally extreme degrees of sensitivity in life, I tend to be particularly cautious when it comes to patterns that make me feel bad. Life is full of enough suffering; it is not wise to deliberately court it when negative patterns show up, even if one does not necessarily understand what precisely is at fault.

In life there are two principles that help us to live better. One of them is having the right target to aim at, the right focus in life. If we want to live well, we have to be pointed in the right direction and moving, however gradually and indirectly, towards that goal. The other is to have some way of measuring progress and making course corrections based on experiences. These two principles and approaches are the long and the short term, both correcting the weaknesses of the other and providing necessary balance. If we have a goal but no course correction, we cannot measure our progress towards that we seek. If we have course correction but no goal, we simply shift with the shifting tides of our life with no direction at all. Yet if we have both we have at least some chance of success through hard work and gradual but continuous improvement in our lives.

At times that improvement can seem slight and a great deal of work and a long set of stages tends to go on before progress is necessarily visible, but so long as we keep on improving and remaining focused on the end we seek, we will find much good in our lives even if it takes a long time to get to where we want to be. This is true even if those goals are as mundane as a peaceful night of sleep where I don’t have nightmares, don’t wake up with foot problems, or feel like I’m about to throw up stomach acid or bile. These should be simple wants. To be sure, I have more ambitious goals, but even the straigthforward and not very complicated goals seem very tough to manage sometimes. It would be nice to know that tomorrow will be better than today, in a lot of ways. I’m not sure how much I can safely assume that will be the case, but rest assured that I work hard so that it may be so, with even a little bit of good fortune.