Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Think about the last piece of bad news that landed on you — the accusation, the cancelled plan, the thing that was not your fault. How long did it take you to start explaining yourself? And what would have happened if you had said nothing at all?
If you had stayed silent, the story would have stayed as it was. It wouldn't have needed your permission to be a tragedy or a triumph. But we rarely do that. We have this reflex to step into the middle of a situation and claim it as our own.
Think about the story of a man named Hakuin. A woman in his village came to him with a baby. She told him the boy was his son. She was lying to protect someone else, but Hakuin didn't argue.
He didn't demand a paternity test or launch into a lecture about honesty. He simply said, "Is that so?" and took the child. He raised that boy for months with a steady, quiet care.
Then, the truth came out. The girl confessed the lie. The real parents showed up at Hakuin's door, apologizing and begging for their son back. They expected a scene.
They expected him to be angry, or hurt, or perhaps to demand some kind of compensation for the months of deception. Instead, Hakuin looked at them and said those same three words again. "Is that so?" and he handed the baby over.
This is the part worth stealing. Hakuin wasn't being passive. He was doing exactly what was needed—he gave the child a home when it was needed, and he gave the child back when it was time. He just refused to let the situation become "eventful."
Most of the weight you carry in a bad week isn't the event itself. It is the hours you spend rehearsing your defense of it. It is the way you let a mistake or a slight become a personal narrative that you have to manage. If you get this wrong, you spend your life reacting to shadows.
We are going to look at how to let the drama stay where it belongs: outside of you.
Think about a time someone took something from you, or accused you of something that just isn't true. In that moment, what is the first thing your brain does? It starts building a case. It rehearses the defense.
It tries to figure out how to make the other person understand your side. We do this because we feel like the event is a personal attack. We feel like we have to "do" something about it to make it go away. But there is another way to look at it.
Hakuin showed us a way to see the world where you don't have to be the main character in every tragedy. You can dignify these events or, much simpler and therefore simply, see them as events that you have no role in being involved. What I mean by that is that most things happen around you, not to you. If a car honks at you, it's just a noise made by a person who is frustrated.
You can choose to hear it as a noise and just move your car. Or, you can take it personally. You can decide that the honk is a statement about your character. You can decide that the person is trying to make you feel small.
The noise is the same. The "event" only becomes a drama when you decide to step into the middle of it and claim it as your own. This is where we run into a problem that a man named Jean-Paul Sartre spent a lot of time worrying about. He watched people in cafes and noticed how they often acted like they were forced to be who they were, like they were just following a script written by society.
He called this bad faith, which is the habit of lying to yourself about your own freedom. He was worried that we treat our lives like things that happen to us, rather than things we are constantly choosing to participate in. If I look at the world through that lens, I see that when I get angry at a rude comment, I am choosing to join a drama. I am choosing to believe that the other person's words have the power to define my day.
I am letting them write the script for me. It feels like I have no choice, but I do. I am choosing to take the bait. I don't think we have to be as extreme as Sartre might suggest.
We can't just ignore everything that happens. We have to eat, we have to work, and we have to care about the people we love. The goal isn't to become a statue. It's to see where you are choosing to let a situation become a heavy weight.
If you can see the event for what it is—just a thing happening in the world—you stop spending your energy on the defense. You leave the drama unattended.
You might be right to feel like this sounds a bit too easy. It’s the kind of thing that sounds great in a quiet room, but feels impossible when you’re actually in the middle of a mess. You could say, "Dr. Non, it’s easy for you to talk about leaving the drama unattended because you aren't the one being screamed at or the one who just lost their job.
If I just stand there and say 'is that so' while my life is falling apart, I'm not being enlightened, I'm just being a doormat. I'm not actually solving anything; I'm just letting people walk all over me." That’s a fair point. There is a very real danger of confusing this kind of clarity with a lack of backbone.
If you don't push back against a wrong, or if you don't stand up for your dignity, you aren't finding peace. You're just being passive. And passivity has its own kind of drama. It’s the drama of the victim who lets the world happen to them without ever trying to change the trajectory of their own life.
But let's look closer at what Hakuin actually did. He wasn't a doormat. He took the baby. He fed the baby.
He housed the baby. He did the work of caretaking while the situation was messy. He didn't ignore the reality of the child's needs. He only ignored the narrative of the lie.
The distinction is subtle but huge. There is a difference between doing what needs to be done and participating in the emotional noise surrounding it. You can be a person of action without being a person of drama. You can address a problem—you can fix the car, you can file the paperwork, you can have the hard conversation—without adopting the "eventfulness" of it.
"When you hear someone's honking a horn behind your moving car, as a signal of anger or whatever over your slow driving, you can also choose to hear them as the sound of a vehicle's horn. And adjust your speed accordingly so that your fellow driver could feel more at ease (with the potential but completely unnecessary road rage) or move to a slower lane (left or right side, depending on which side of the road that you are driving). Problem's solved." What I mean is that the problem is solved the moment you stop trying to solve the other person's feelings. The honk is a sound.
The noise is a fact. Your reaction to it is your only real territory. When you try to "fix" their anger, you're stepping into their script. When you just change your lane, you're staying in your own.
Think about a time you had to deal with a piece of feedback that felt like a personal attack. Maybe it was a review from a client who used sharp, biting language to describe your work. Or perhaps it was a comment from a colleague who suggested that your standard of quality was slipping. In those moments, it is so easy to let that feedback become a heavy weight you have to carry all day.
You start to feel like the person who wrote it has captured your true self. You begin to rehearse what you want to say back to them. You spend your evening mentally constructing a defense of your character. You are turning a single piece of data into a long, exhausting drama.
You are letting someone else's opinion become the script for your own life. If you look at it through the lens of Hakuin, you can see a different way through this. You can see the review for what it is: a set of words written by a person who has a specific set of preferences and a specific mood at a specific time. It is a fact of the world, like the weather or the sound of a horn.
It doesn't have to be a judgment on your soul. Watch what happens next. When you stop trying to "solve" the feeling of being insulted, you actually become more effective at the work itself. If a client is unhappy with a project, the event is that they are unhappy.
You can address that fact directly. You can ask what needs to change. You can do the work to fix the problem. But if you also try to manage their perception of you, or if you let their harsh tone dictate your internal state, you are just adding extra weight to the task.
You are making a simple repair job into a marathon of emotional endurance. "Or, you can participate in this "eventful drama" by getting angry, upset, and disappointed by the impatience of your fellow driver. You might even stop the car and get down from your vehicle and have a verbal or fist fight with your fellow driver. Over a small event that doesn't have to be this caustic. You may even be able to bet that your fellow driver might not even think of it as caustic as you think.
It's just noise for you him, but a "personalizable eventfulness" for you." What I mean is that most of the damage we do to ourselves happens in the space between the event and our reaction. The review was written. That is the event.
Your anger, your defense, and your sense of wounded pride are the drama you are choosing to join. When you can see the difference, you can do the work without the weight. You can be excellent at what you do because you aren't busy being the main character in someone else's bad mood.
How fair is that to you, your mind, and your mental health? The lesson that Hakuin wants to teach us is simple: You don't have to "participate in human drama," no matter how much those who seem to associate you with such drama call for your involvement. In this story, instead of participating in the whole messiness that he was not even involved in, Hakuin has decided to give every one some time to see the situation in its clearest light.