Fairy Tales # 11: The Button

A man in a certain town ran all his life. In the morning he ran to work, in the evening he ran home from work, and in between he ran after buses. He couldn’t stop, because he didn’t know that you could.

And one day he was running after a bus and suddenly saw that the one running wasn’t him at all, but some man in a grey jacket. He himself was sitting in a chair, pressing buttons.

“Well, how about that,” the man thought, and just to see, he let go of the button.

The man in the grey jacket stopped. The bus drove off. Nothing terrible happened. It didn’t even rain.

Everything was different after that. His boss shouts at him, and he watches the boss shout at the man in the grey jacket, and finds it interesting. Someone steps on his foot on the tram, and he thinks: “That was neatly done.”

His wife asks: “Why are you so calm? Are you ill?”

“No,” he says, “I’m at the computer.”

“What computer? We don’t even have a computer.”

The man looked around. There really was no computer. No chair either. But there was a button.

And that bus is still going. The ones who made it are sitting in it.

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The subtext. Buddhist thought: what we take for an outer race is largely pressed by our own mind. Release the button, and the one who was running stops, and nothing terrible happens. Stopping is the first step of practice: shamatha, calm abiding, begins when we stop chasing.