Am I wasting my life for chasing a dream?

“Cautious: Under the good name of Dream, Greed grows!”

Life has magical rules, it keeps repeating itself regardless of how many generations pass and whether you are aware of it or not...

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As Vietnamese people often say, “Ăn quả nhớ kẻ trồng cây” = “When you eat the fruit, remember the one who planted the tree” to talk about gratitude, but I see another layer of this maxim. It divides people into two types, two lifestyles, or two stages of a person’s life: Initially, when they are young, people like to eat fruit, and then when they are older, more mature, more aware, they begin to move to the second stage: the stage of planting trees.

Just like when people are young, they have many opportunities and abilities to learn, to tạke, then when they are old, they have the ability and responsibility to teach, to give, to pass on what they have learned and accumulated in life.

Although I still like to “eat fruit”, still enjoy all the fruits of life, at the same time, I am also gradually moving to the stage of planting trees. But please don’t misunderstand, I’m not talking about the figurative meaning of this sentence. I mean planting trees in the literal sense.

30 years old I suddenly like the idea of planting trees, the idea of living in a house surrounded by fruit trees and then sharing those fruits with people, with animals, with others being… That idea started a few years ago, when I often walked/drove around the city to look for land that I could afford to buy. Any land, any house for sale with fruit trees around it strangely attracted me. I began to have the desire to have my own farmhouse full of fruit trees.

Gradually I gave up that idea when the land for farming, farmhouse garden is often very expensive. My ability is only to buy land of a few dozen square meters. However, that idea has never completely died out, it keeps burning, waiting for the opportunity to come back.

Since joining natural farming communities, I have started to care about vegetable gardens around my house, but every time I think about having to plant, water, and take care of vegetable beds, I feel… bored and tired. I have never grown vegetables or seen my relatives grow vegetables, so of course, I do not have much love and desire for vegetable beds. Moreover, vegetables here in town are too cheap and very fresh. Growing vegetables sometimes costs more money, time, and effort than buying vegetables.

One day, while wandering around looking for lands, I discovered a large farm located in a valley quite close to the big lake and also the city center. The farm has large lotus ponds covering the lake, fish swimming around, duck and chicken, dog and cat, and especially around the lake, people grow a lot of vegetables and fruit trees because they want to do photography services and farm restaurant. I immediately saw a “golden” idea.

The idea was: if I could buy a piece of land or build a small house next to this farm, wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t it be even better than having my own farm?

That way I could enjoy the atmosphere and scenery of the whole farm with all its resources: lotus, fish, vegetables, fruits… without spending any money to grow and take care of it. A kind of “parasitic” farmhouse that benefits both sides. They can sell me flowers, fish, vegetables and fruits and I have the whole farm without spending any money for the farm-land. Such a perfect plan. I liked this idea very much.

But no matter what you like, if you don’t like it enough or if you don’t longing for it enough, it won’t be a “will” to make it happen. Liking energy is not strong/condense enough to change the reality.

One day, through the internet, I found information about an old house next to that farm which had been for sale at a price acceptable to me, even though I didn’t have that much money for the investment.

This is when the dream does not come true — when it is not the right time. Those days I was far away from home, so I asked my sister to come to take a look at the house: if it was good, I could put down a deposit and then find the money. My sister came to see that house and said that the paper of the house was an issue. That land could not be converted to residential land, it only had agricultural land papers. So we decided not to buy it, because even if I did, I would need at least a few hundred million more to renovate and rebuild the house. I did not like the old ugly tube houses that people often build. The amount of money for the project suddenly became too much, beside the paper isuse, so I gave up the idea of buying that house.

Later, they sold it to someone else, and when I returned to the town, I went to that house to take a look by myself, and yes, I felt a bit pity/regret that I didn’t buy it. It has such a perfect location, and the old character of the house was not a big deal, even a good thing. I felt sorry for myself because of listening to my sister. This was the second time I had missed a beautiful opportunity to buy beautiful land, based on her opinion. But regretting was useless. I continued to go around that area, hoping to find a more suitable piece of land. I couldn’t find anything and almost gave up, but inside me, that dream of having a farm was still alive, until:

Last month, I came back to that area to visit (and still hoped to find another piece of land). It was summer, the season of many fruits: papaya, orange, banana, rose apple… Specially a guava tree laden with ripe fruits very close to the lotus farm I like. Thing is, fruits are plenty and abundant, but all wasted, rotten on the trees and on the ground — no one wanted to eat, no one cared about. Such a waste. Why?

I was curious so I found the owner to ask and was told, “The guavas are full of worms and maggots because there is no time to wrap them in plastic, so they are left to rot and fall. In the rainy season, if you don’t wrap them in plastic, they will be bland and tasteless.”

I was standing next to the guave tree, receiving the answer from one who was actually living in my dream house, observing the ripe fruits melting on the ground —all at once: a moment of speechlessness, of zen, of no-mind, a moment of awakeness: while witnessing a yellow ripe guava falling down from the branch to be one of those other ripe rotten guavas on the ground — suddenly, the greed for a farm of my own disappeared, falling, broken into pieces naturally just like that guava…

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Such a moment — one could call it a liberation or a satori – a lot of “seeings”/realizations happening through my being all at once, so many new knowings/understandings lit up inside me at the same time like a flood of light that it was hard to put in words the normal way, some of them were:

Life is so short, no matter how rich we are, we can’t be in two places at the same time, no matter how much money/food we have, we can’t eat more than our stomach can hold. The more wealth, the more worries we have. The more desires we have, the less time we live, because we’re so busy worrying about everything: things we do have, things we don’t have yet.

Desires give birth to more desires, never ending. Is life just a series of days of filling our greed, satisfying our desires? I don’t want to live like that.

At that moment, after hearing the answer and watching the guava fall, I suddenly felt that my want/wish/desire for a farmhouse was just a waste. A waste of life. A waste of time. I was wasting my time on an idea that I didn’t really need.

The man who gave me the answer — the owner of the guava house — was rushing out to go to work. He must have worked in an office, based on what he was wearing. That made me think: I’m luckier, I don’t have to go to work, but if I had a farm, would I have time for it? If I had a farm, would I be able to take care of it?

The fact is, I already have a house to live in, and another piece of land still empty. Yet I still can’t take care of that house or land as I wished (or should). Will more houses or more land satisfy me? Why do I want more land and more houses? Is it just greed – to have more, to possess more – under the beautiful name of “dream”?

Am I wasting my life for such unnecessary things? Am I wasting my life by chasing dreams?

Yes, I am wasting my life’s source for a dream I don’t even know the purpose of. How weird! So much waste — all under the name of a dream!

(It is the time to question your dreams: is it just greed or there is something else, before chasing it.)

Likewise, the biggest waste of humans is wasting energy. Greed consumes all our energy every day.

That moment I realize that I have too much already but still do not know it is (more than) “enough”. If I keep pursuing desire forever, will my whole life only be worth a few assets? Such a waste! Is all the energy of my life only for material things? How stupid!

The good thing is that I can let go of this desire very naturally, without any pressure or suppression.

At that moment when the guava fell from the branch and created the sound “boop”, I observed all the energy of desire inside me change. The passion for a farmhouse suddenly fell and broken just like that guava, very naturally, very satisfied, without any restraint.

The immense serenity is as if a mountain has just been lifted off my shoulders. Greed is mountains. The more greedy we are, the more we are crushed by our own greed, just like the monkey Sun Wukong in Journey to the West who was crushed by a mountain for a thousand years.

Each of us has a monkey that is being crushed like that, waiting for a master/a guru to come and free us. We just don’t know that we are also that master/guru, our own Duong Tang Monk, to free ourselves from greed with Awareness.

Realizing, seeing the stupidity, seeing the waste and letting go – this is a natural process.

That day, I let go of the desire for a farm/farmhouse of my own, but as I said, what you deeply-like, or love will still follow you like a shadow or settle down inside you like a seed, and when the time comes, it will grow.

That day, the desire/dream for owning a farm has been abandoned, but the love and the longing to grow fruit trees, to create an Eden by myself and share with my loved ones, is still there.

The dream is now no longer a dream, it has become a cause/a seed. Desire and dream can be fadded, but cause cannot. The ripe guava fruit may have fallen to the ground, rotted, and dissolved, but the guava seeds are still there, waiting for the opportunity to grow into new guava trees.

That day, the raw-dream had fallen and rotted, but the subtle-dream of creating more value for the land I already have started to grow…

A new direction for the life energy that caused me to a completely different plane of liberation,

not long after that.

Yes. Life has magical rules, it keeps repeating itself regardless… until you aware of it and stop it,
with both hands up!

enough for today

Phi Tuyet, phi.losopher, poet and mystic