Train your Mind: Tibetan Exercises in Wisdom and Compassion [Paperback]

Slogan Thirty: Don’t Be So Predictable

We all have a tendency to react to events in life through

familiar and habitual patterns. Much of the time we are on

‘autopilot’, and what we do is largely predictable. This slogan

is about being creative rather than reactive in our approach

to the world.24

Sometimes it is as if we wake up and realize that things

can be done differently. Or we meet another person who

says or does something unexpected. Like when your debit

card at the supermarket checkout isn’t working and you’re

standing there with all the goods on the conveyor belt and

can’t pay, and the customer behind you says: ‘It’s okay, I’ll

pay for your groceries.’

It can be simple things like actually talking about how we

really feel when a colleague asks this at morning coffee break,

instead of saying: ‘Yes, it’s all fine’, when it’s not.

These moments when we are not so predictable are

moments when we are authentic and present. You could also

say that they are moments when we are fully alive. Any time

we act in a completely predictable way, it is as if we were

already dead.

Another meaning of this phrase is that we should avoid

the tendency to always keep track of pluses and minuses in

our relationships. We expect to receive as much as we give,

of money and of our time and energy. If we don’t, we tend

to become dissatisfied and may distance ourselves from l3&