Modern life is high speed, high pressure and we are surrounded with images designed to make us want things and ways of life that are not ours. We want to be famous, rich and beautiful. We want to be loved more than we are or in a different way. We want luxurious homes, vehicles, clothes and foods. The life we want is never our own. All the time we want these attributes and things, our real life is moving, serene in its unknowable beauty beneath our noses. If you realise the delusion you live within and wish to experience the truth of your life, Buddhists say you have established the will to the truth.

It’s a cosmic irony that here we are living this strange, extraordinary, ordinary life as human beings, experiencing this unknowable thing yet we spend our time wishing we were elsewhere and different. We spend each moment measuring our achievements and rewards against our peers, settling scores and making deposits into an account we can never redeem. In each moment the mysterious treasures of a real human life trickle through our fingers. There is no substitute for living this real life.