The Zen Master Tic-Nat Han has a wonderful one-liner and it is, it's not enough to suffer.

You must touch peace, too, okay, and happiness and ease and well-being.

I love that because it is so easy to get into a mindset of that this life is a problem

that we're trying to solve, okay?

And in a daily way, we lock into getting grim.

I see it in myself, I see it in many, kind of trying to get through the day.

So I'm starting tonight's talk with a poem by the poet Hafez that I really love.

It's called Tripping Over Joy.

And he writes, what is the difference between your experience of existence and that of a saint?

The saint knows that the spiritual path is a sublime chess game with God

and that the beloved has just made such a fantastic move that the saint is now continually tripping over

in joy and bursting out in laughter and saying, I surrender.

Whereas my dear, I'm afraid you still think you have a thousand serious moves.

So that's the title of tonight's talk, a thousand serious moves.

I think it's a great line and it really sums up our trance in a certain way

that we go about life and if you kind of catch yourself at any moment and some way we're on this track

and we're on our way somewhere and it's kind of a serious business.

I'm not saying it's un-villuted, we marble in our fun, but we can get really grim.

And in a way I could stop the talk right here and if all we did together, perhaps for the next few weeks,

was how to reflection where we would pause and just say, well, right now in that trance of a thousand serious moves,

it's a fabulous wake-up. I play with that one a lot.

But I'll talk since I have the time to talk tonight.

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