Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Equanimity

"So when you extend thoughts of goodwill [mettā] to others, you’re not thinking, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.” You’re thinking, “May you understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” This is an attitude you can extend to all beings, without hypocrisy, regardless of how they’ve behaved in the past. Now, in some cases — where people have been particularly cruel — this may be difficult. You might feel that justice requires that they suffer first before they change their ways. But you have to remind yourself that people rarely see the connection between their misbehavior and their suffering, so wishing for them to suffer — even when it seems to serve the cause of justice — would rarely foster the causes for true happiness in the world. It’s better to wish that people come to their senses and have a change of heart on their own, and that you’d be willing to aid them in that process in whatever way you can. After all, wouldn’t you...

"Sometimes we’re told that in our practice of meditation, and in our approach to practice of the Buddha’s teachings as a whole, we shouldn’t be attached to results. Now, this statement can be taken in a wrong way and a right way. The wrong way would be that we don’t care about the results, that we just do what we want to do and let the chips fall where they may, convinced in the rightness of our intentions. That’s a recipe for disaster, because one of the first things we have to learn is that we can’t totally trust our intentions. After all, we’re here to learn what our intentions are, and the best way for testing them is to see how they bear out in action, what results they give. If something seems like a good intention, you follow it, and then you watch to see what the results are. Many times the results turn out different from what you expected, in which case there was something wrong with the intention. It wasn’t skillful enough. So this statement of not being attached to the ...