Bridgeen Rea-Kaya reads a story from Ajahn Brahm's book about a captain who orders his men to make tea when they're trapped with no escape. The lesson: when there's nothing you can do, rest and conserve energy instead of panicking.
Hello! I am going to read you a wee story. It's from this amazing, wonderful, fantastic book called Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung? It's a great title because you could even say that for the— about the coronavirus. Who ordered this truckload of dung? But it's by a man called Ajahn Brahm. There he is. That's his name, that's how to spell it. Maybe it's coming off back to front, but called Ajahn Brahm, and he grew up in London and he went to Cambridge University. He became a physicist, and then he went off to Thailand and became a Thai forest monk and eventually ended up as an abbot in a Buddhist monastery in Australia. And when he was there, he wrote this book full of all different anecdotes and things that happened to him or different different advice and I love it. And every time I read it, and I do read it quite often, especially the first couple of weeks of my Introduction to Mindfulness course at Namaste on the Emerald Road, people come up to me and they ask me, where did you get that book? What's the name of that book? Can I take a photograph of that book? And then they go and buy it. Someone I know told me that she went and bought 10 copies. I think I'm singularly responsible for the sale of it and it is now sold out as far as I can see. Everywhere. So this is quite an old, fallen-apart copy, but you can probably get it as a resale on Amazon or something. But it's a great book, and if you like this story, I will record a few more. I'm just thinking of people being stuck in the house with coronavirus lockdowns, and you might like to hear a little story. And this one is a good one to start us off because it's called Drinking Tea When There's No Way Out. So he's going to talk about a situation that someone was in, and the advice is just to just sit and have a cup of tea. And actually, we could probably be doing with that now as well. So here we go. Here's the wee story. There's always something we can do with the ingredients of our day, even if that something is just sitting down, enjoying our last cup of tea. The following story was told to me by a former colleague. He was a fellow schoolteacher, but before that he'd been a soldier serving in the British Army in World War II. My colleague was on patrol in the jungles of Burma. He was young, far from home, and very frightened. The scout from his patrol returned to tell the captain the terrible news: their small patrol had stumbled into a huge number of Japanese troops. The patrol was vastly outnumbered, completely surrounded. The young British soldier prepared himself to die. He expected his captain to order the men to fight their way out. That was the manly thing to do. Maybe someone would make it. If not, well, they would take some of the enemy with them into death. That's what soldiers did. But not the soldier who was the captain. He ordered his men to stay put, sit down, and make a cup of tea. It was, after all, the British Army. The young soldier thought his commanding officer had gone mad. How can anyone think of a cup of tea when surrounded by the enemy with no way out and about to die? In an army, especially at war, Orders had to be obeyed. They all made what they thought was to be their last cup of tea. Before they had finished drinking their tea, the scout came back and whispered to his captain. The captain asked for the men's attention. The enemy has moved, he announced. There's now a way out. Pack your kit quickly and quietly. Let's go. They all got out safely, which is why he could tell me the story many years later. He told me that he owed his life to the wisdom of that captain, not just at war in Burma, but many times since. Several times in his life, it was as if he was surrounded by the enemy, completely outnumbered, with no way out, and about to die. By the enemy, he meant serious illness, horrendous difficulty, and tragedy, in the middle of which there seemed no way out. Without the experience in Burma, he would have tried to fight his way through the problem and no doubt made it much worse in the process, but instead, when death or deadly trouble surrounded him on all sides, he simply sat down and made a cup of tea. The world is always changing, Life is a flux. He drank his tea, conserved his energy, and waited for the time which always came when he could do something effective like get safely out. For those who don't like tea, remember this saying: when there's nothing to do, then do nothing. It may seem obvious, but it may also save your life. Couldn't really be more appropriate for the current circumstances. So when there's nothing to do, do nothing. Permission to do nothing. Enjoy doing nothing. Rest, drink tea, take care of yourself. And if you like this story, let me know and I will record a few more. Thank you.
