Napoleon once said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s in the middle of making a mistake.” And if my brief experiences with violence have taught me anything, it’s this: when we’re engaged in a conflict, it’s easy to be taken in by the false impression that we are facing perfect adversaries. When I was a kid, I used to pass this park on 175th St.. I never liked walking by there, because there was a gang of boys slightly older than me who used to tackle me and take my things. What I remember most is the way everything seemed like a blur as soon as they started pouncing on me. It was as though some thousand-armed god were raining his blows down on my body. There seemed to be no spaces in the beating, only a solid wall of hurt. Had I faced violence year after year, I no doubt would have changed my perception of what was happening. I would have learned to see spaces between the blows. I would have learned that no adversary is perfect. And I would have learned to wait for those boys’ mistakes — a loss of balance, a punch thrown too far — to seize an opportunity to prevail.

The spiritual life is predicated on a desire for peace — the deepest peace possible — and yet, if we’re honest, we have to admit that there are enemies inside us. Not every thought we think, not every impulse we have leads towards our true well being. It’s not that the mind is fundamentally bad or that we ourselves are fundamentally bad. Yet there are real dangers in how and what we think. One of the reasons we have a hard time admitting these dangers to ourselves is that our mental perceptions seem inevitable. A thought such as “I always say the wrong thing” enters the mind, and we immediately see that thought as being perfectly formed and solid. And when friends console us, saying, “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” we tend to defend our thoughts with this further thought: “But what I’m thinking is true!” We take the idea that our thoughts are true very seriously — as though some team of scientists had independently verified our worst fears. But of course, there is no such team of scientists. There is only our habit of believing whatever we think.

Why do we do this? We believe what we think primarily because we see no spaces between our thoughts. Our internal arguments seem so continuous, so seamlessly woven together, that the idea of a truth apart from them seems impossible. Our thought-patterns are like those huge corporations that never pay taxes because they are so intricately woven into our economy that eventually the idea that they shouldn’t be held accountable starts to seem natural. And we’re sort of like the IRS, which prefers to go after small businesses and individuals because they’re less trouble to deal with: we prefer to blame our sorrows on a noise in the street or a change in the weather, rather than deal with the thought-monopolies that are running the show inside our heads.

And yet, there is space between the blows. No empire is perfect, no enemy without a weak point. The secret to finding this space is somewhat counter-intuitive, for it requires not so much energetic resistance as a certain kind of acceptance. Chuang Tzu tells a story that illustrates this well. Once upon a time, he says, there was a butcher named Ting. Butcher Ting cut meat with the same knife for decades without ever sharpening his blade. People would come to him and ask, “How do you manage not having to sharpen your blade?” He would answer, “I aim for the spaces between the joints. That way, my blade actually hits nothing at all, so it never wears down.” Dealing with pain inside the mind requires the same approach: in order to find the weak points in your destructive thought-patterns, you have to begin by aiming at something that offers no resistance: your inner goodness. For you already have inside you, to some degree, patience, kindness, determination, and all the other qualities you need to be happy. The key is that you must put your attention on those “spaces between the joints,” rather than trying to hack away at the bones of your sorrows.

Your inner goodness needs to be cultivated, of course, but that cultivation comes not from trying to substitute the life you want for the life you have, but from putting your mind on what is already working — for in fact, there is some way in which you already feel yourself to be enough, to have enough. People think that acceptance and desire for change are opposites. They say, “If I accept things as they are, they’ll never change.” But acceptance and desire for change are actually more like the two feet on which a person moves forward. And in fact, if you try to walk with only one, you’ll fall down pretty quickly. But once you understand the way that acceptance and desire for change together create a forward-moving equilibrium, you can take joy in their synergy. For acceptance of who you are right now puts your being into motion, which only makes it easier to make the effort needed to feel even better about yourself. This is how the future is made.

Recently, a friend of mine said to me, “I have a problem with motivation.” I said to him, “You know, motivation is innate. If you have desires, you already have motivation to fulfill them.” He gave me a funny look, and of course, what I was saying runs counter to what our culture teaches. We’re a very results-oriented culture, which is to say we know very little about the real way the present and the future are bridged. If we aren’t already running four miles in the morning, making six figures, married with kids, or fully enlightened, we assume this is because we lack some magical propulsion-system called motivation. But motivation isn’t a propelling force, like a rocket. Motivation is more like a stream that moves effortlessly towards its source. We are always, in fact, moving towards what we have been seeking all our lives (often without even knowing it.) If you’re alive and wanting to be fulfilled, you already have a stream in you that is flowing towards that fulfillment. The problem isn’t lack of current; the problem is that we keep paddling against that current. And what keeps us paddling against the current are the stories in our minds that we don’t have what it takes, that we aren’t capable of finding our way, that we can’t trust ourselves. These stories are like little rocks on which the raft of our desires gets hooked. But if you can unhook the raft, there’s no need to add further momentum: you’ll already be going where you want to go. You don’t need a mission statement or an affirmation. You already know where to go.

So the practice is actually quite simple, though it’s a practice that has to be done rather than talked or read about. For every thing or situation in your life that feels like a block, try to see the way that “block” actually has put you in contact with your innate motivation. Writing in a journal can be very helpful for understanding the stream in which all your conflicts are scattered like stones. I like to spend some time each morning writing sentences that start with the phrase, “I’m glad that …” (I like the word “glad,” because sometimes “grateful” feels too heavy or too serious.) This puts me in touch with the fact that I already have and am some of what I want in this life. Then, gradually, I’ll switch to writing sentences that start with the phrase, “I’m excited that …” That switch is very important, because it’s what puts you in touch with your inner momentum. Many people practice gratitude in a way that makes them secretly believe they don’t deserve their blessings. They say, “I’m grateful to be alive,” but what they’re secretly thinking is, “This is going to be taken away from me any second now,” and so they end up cultivating anxiety rather than gratitude. This is why using the phrases “excited” or “looking forward” can be helpful, because these phrases remind us that opportunities for being happy are abundant, not scarce. By understanding that we are already in motion, we start to see the space between the blows. But you have to practice this looking forward to what comes. You can’t just wait for it to show up on your doorstep.

The mind will resist this. You will probably hear voices telling you that your excitement, your gratitude are fake. You will probably hear voices telling you that half of what you were excited by in the past never materialized, never came to pass. And it’s true: a lot of the things we are excited by in life don’t end up coming to us in the form we would like. When I wake up in the morning, I’m usually excited by the prospect of doing ten or twenty things that day, and I’m lucky if I can make a quarter of them happen. The point, though, is that this “success rate” doesn’t matter, because happiness is not like a to-do list that we check things off of. Happiness is simply the absence of resistance, and we experience — at least in a small way — that absence of resistance when we learn to look forward to our work here on earth, rather than worrying about completing that work.

In this regard, the creative process works in the same way. Artists sometimes have trouble finding fulfillment in their creative lives, not because this frustration is in the natural order of things, but because they tend to waste their time either uprooting their own gardens or dreaming of other people’s. There is this prevailing idea, especially in America, that creativity is the result either of innate talent or else of hard work. And in fact, neither belief is true. There is no amount of talent or hard work that will come out of you if you fall prey to your own insecurities, and this is why a lot of what art consists of isn’t technique or inspiration, but rather, training the mind to focus on what is already beautiful. Spilling paint on a canvas or words on a page doesn’t require nearly as much energy as people believe. What is required, however, is focus — specifically, focus on the potential that all lines, colors, words, and sounds have to bring insight into the truth of things. And that focus requires an appreciation for things as they imperfectly are and the determination to resist the idea that what blocks us from that truth is a solid, inevitable force.

There’s a Japanese proverb that’s been making the rounds recently: “Fall down seven times and stand up eight.” It hardly needs to be said that to flourish in this life requires resilience. The problem is that people think of resilience as a type of brute strength, rather than as a skill. No one is born with the ability to stand up every time he’s knocked down. You have to practice resilience in your mind before you can live it in your life. For like a ship on the water, it is freedom from resistance, not striving, that keeps bringing us back up to the surface.