Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Equanimity

"The thought of someone you’ve lost or some thing that you’ve lost? Reflect on impermanence and inconstancy: These things are all made to be lost. Think of Ajaan Chah’s analogy: to think of the cup as already broken. This doesn’t mean that you treat it casually. You actually take very good care of it. But part of the mind has to be prepared that someday it’s going to break. The Buddha compares people to pots. As he says, all pots get broken eventually. Whether it takes a long or a short time, they’re all heading to be broken. In the same way, people are all headed to being broken. The world is broken. It’s never going to be perfect. If you can accept that, then you can live with it, and do what you can to make it a little bit better. But particularly, do what you can to make yourself better, make yourself more reliable, so that the changes of the world don’t lead to changes inside, at least not to the deterioration of anything good inside. When you can maintain this kind of soli...

"When, while you’re trying to develop compassion and empathetic joy, you run across cases where you can’t help the other person, either to become happy or to maintain happiness, that’s when you have to develop equanimity. This is the equanimity of a good doctor who realizes that he can’t solve all the cases in the world. But if he lets his heart get broken over all the cases he can’t solve, he won’t have the energy to help the cases he might have been able to solve. So for the people who come to him and have the karma that allows him to help — and he himself has the karma that allows him to help them — he should think of that as a precious opportunity. It’s not always there. Make the most of it and don’t let yourself get distracted by things you can’t control or where you can’t be of help. Because, as I said, karma is complex. The combination of the patient’s karma to be in a position where he or she can be cured, and the doctor’s karmic connection with that patient: It doesn’t al...