So I was talking my friend tonight, we went out to eat in a local restaurant that specialized in spicy food. In fact I think the restaurant name was Spicy Food, if you can imagine that. I guess the owner wasn’t able to feel really creative when he was designing the name of the restaurant. Which is kind of how some things go, you just kind of pick a name, and off you go. And I suppose that the name worked, because the place was fairly popular. We were lucky to get a table because it filled up rather quickly after we sat down. It’s not a big place, it’s actually on the third floor in a small building above a clothing boutique. Kind of like those weird shops that sell strange things that make you wonder how they manage to stay in business.
So anyways, my friend was telling me about his big plans to start up his own restaurant. He’d been checking out a lot of the local places, you know the way you do because you just feel it’s the right thing to do, right? And because you can realize this you can probably understand why my friend was making sure to go slow and make sure he was able to understand the process. Because nobody really wants to start a business and then have the business not make any money, right? Of course you realize that the most important part of a business is to make money. Or it probably should be up there on the list of important things, if indeed you are one of those people that keep lists of important things.
And it’s kind of interesting when you think about the whole concept of important things. Because what is at the top of the list of course is usually thought to be the most important thing, but what happens if stuff at the bottom is not met, how in the world can the stuff at the top important if the stuff underneath isn’t being taken care of?
For example, I was a at a lecture once given by a Buddhist Priest that was visiting from a different temple that the one we were. There were a lot of people there, and some had some from clear across the prefecture. There was one guy who took a day off work to visit this lecture, and another guy who had to bribe his wife with a day of shopping for the lecture.
And he started talking about things that we think are important, and it turns out that they really aren’t all that important, when you stop and think about it. And the things that we don’t think are important are the things that we neglect, but most of the time the things that we neglect turn out to be the most important of all. Unfortunately a lot of times we don’t realize important things until they are gone. It’s like we never learn to realize the significance of all that is around us. He said that we need to really understand that all of the big things in life are really made up of important little things. And without the little things, there are no big things. And one of the cool things about that, at least according to him, is that the first thing you’ll realize when you accept this simple idea is that you are literally surrounded with fantastic abundance just waiting for you to recognize it.
Like that table of really cute girls that came in to the restaurant midway through our dinner. We sure recognized them, and they sure recognized us. But I’ll leave that to another story.