When things outside aren’t going well, the Buddha doesn’t say to replace them with more pleasant things outside or an I-don’t-care equanimity. He says to remind yourself that the real work, the real problem is inside.

"We need equanimity in order to deal with difficult situations, but you don’t want to be equanimous about everything that comes along, “You know, the mind isn’t getting concentrated, well, I’ll be equanimous about it. Greed has moved in: I’ll be equanimous about it."

Well, that doesn’t work. When things outside aren’t going well, the Buddha doesn’t say to replace them with more pleasant things outside or an I-don’t-care equanimity. He says to remind yourself that the real work, the real problem is inside. Replace householder grief with what he calls renunciate grief. In other words, when the situation outside is bad, you remind yourself that the real problem is not the situation outside. It’s the fact that you still have work to be done inside. That’s why you’re suffering. So that’s a case where you just can’t be equanimous about everything.

This doesn’t mean that when situations aren’t going well outside that the other person may not be at fault. But the question is, do you want to suffer? And if you don’t want to suffer, you’ve got to turn around and ask yourself what you’re doing that’s unskillful.

We’re not here to sort out who’s right and who’s wrong. There is no last judgment in Buddhism because there’s no beginning point in time. How could you ever keep score or keep tally when, as the Buddha says, you can’t find a beginning point? It makes sense to keep tally only when there’s a beginning point and you can say, “Okay, since day x this person did wrong x number of times, that person did wrong y number of times.” That’s because you have a line where the comparisons begin. But here we don’t have that. So it’s not a question of deciding who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s to blame and who’s not. The question is, do you want to suffer or not?

The same situation applies inside as well. When things aren’t going well, you can’t just simply be equanimous about it. You’ve got to ask yourself, “What’s going wrong here? What’s the mistake? What’s the problem that I haven’t understood yet?” And work on that."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Committed Relationship"

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