Blue Cliff Record number 6 has this as its punch line: after enlightenment, “every day is a good day.”

For someone who experiences genuine contentment, a pandemic makes no difference. Zero difference. Nothing is added to or taken away from this contentment because nothing can be. Everything–dreams about what one will do, hopes about how one’s life could be, ambitions whose purpose is to make one into Somebody–ceases to be special. Thus, everything is good and lovely and fine.

This contentment is without craving and thus without even a whiff of dis-ease. Pain, for this one, does not lead to suffering. There is nothing to flee from, to grasp onto, or, in some grand sense, to look forward to. Everything, unfurling as it does, just is. Unfurling as it does, it can be welcomed as it is.

Days turn over–they just are; they are just so. But to say that “they just are; they are just so” is, perhaps, to miss their delicate fragrance. Dinner together is sweet–but not in some grasping, you-and-I-are-gonna-die-someday way. Darkness before dawn is sweetly silent and light after daybreak almost, or maybe not almost, a work of magic. Anything ordinary, coming and going, is wonderful yet not so wonderful that it’s held onto. So wonderful it is that it can be forgotten, making room for what’s now here.

Contentment, to say this, roams with the ten thousand things, going where they go or going as they go. Without being fixated on anything right now, how is it for you?