My Teacher, the Gas Station

My Dharma teacher—recently gave me an assignment: to cultivate joy.

The first kind, Sympathetic Joy—feeling happy for the good fortune of others—I understood. It was something I could practice. I could feel it on quiet weekends, walking with my daughter, seeing the world through her eyes. I could cultivate happiness for her as we painted together, her small hands guiding mine. This was a joy I knew how to build.

But the second—Spontaneous Joy—was a mystery.

How do you practice being spontaneous?

It felt like a contradiction. A puzzle I was determined to solve.

My default mode has always been one of acquisition. My path began with a hunger to understand—to map the territory, to fill notebooks with the architecture of awakening. Looking back, I can see this as the work of a kind of “Hungry Ghost” in me—a part born from a quiet sense of not-enoughness, convinced that knowledge could serve as armor.

If I could just understand spontaneity, I thought, I could master it too.

But this, I was beginning to see, was the trap.

The answer didn’t come on a meditation cushion.

It came on a rough Sunday.

A disagreement with my wife left a bitter taste in the air. Her words—“You’re not dependable”—hit something deep. I felt the familiar surge: heat rising in my chest, the mind snapping into position, drafting its defense. A list of evidence. A case to win.

I could already see where it was going—the argument, the escalation, the quiet damage that lingers after the words are done.

And for once, I paused.

I didn’t want to be that person anymore.

The anger was still there—raw, electric—but instead of unleashing it, I carried it somewhere it couldn’t cause harm. I went to the gym. I let it move through my body—burning, releasing, exhausting itself.

Not suppression. Not avoidance.

Just space.

And afterward, something had shifted.

When I saw my wife again, the fire was gone. The need to be right felt distant, almost irrelevant. In its place was something quieter—softer. We didn’t need to resolve the argument. We just needed to reconnect.

The rest of the evening settled into a kind of peace—simple, unremarkable, complete.

But the real teaching was still waiting.

Later that night, I ran out to fill up at a gas station.

A young man—maybe in his twenties—was trying to buy a slice of pizza. He was ten cents short. The clerk, from behind the counter, was dismissive, almost hostile. It was a small moment, but it carried a weight—the kind of quiet humiliation that lingers.

And then something happened.

Not a thought. Not a decision.

Just a clear, immediate movement.

“Give him a pepperoni pizza,” I heard myself say.

The clerk laughed, confused. “I’m not joking,” I said, calm.

The clerk boxed a slice.

“No, you didn’t hear me, the whole pie.”

The transaction went through.

The young man hugged me—hard. His gratitude was overwhelming, almost painful in its intensity. I told him it wasn’t necessary, because in that moment, it didn’t feel like something I had done for him.

It just felt like what needed to happen.

As I walked out, I saw him at his car, sharing the pizza with his family. He waved again. I waved back.

Driving home, I didn’t feel pride. There was no sense of accomplishment. Just a quiet gratitude—and something steady underneath it. A kind of ease I didn’t have to hold onto.

And somewhere in that quiet, the puzzle dissolved.

You cannot practice spontaneous joy.

You can only practice getting out of your own way.

You sit with your anger long enough to see through it. You loosen your grip on being right. You begin to recognize the parts of you that are always trying to acquire, to fix, to become—and you meet them with a kind of patience.

Slowly, the mind opens.

And then, one day, in the most ordinary place, life presents you with a moment.

And without calculation—without effort—a simple, clear “yes” arises.

It doesn’t feel like yours.

It feels like action without friction. Like something moving through you, unimpeded.

That is spontaneous joy.

Not something you find.

Something that finds you—once you’ve stopped getting in the way.

“We must be willing to be completely ordinary people, which means accepting ourselves as we are without trying to become greater, purer, more spiritual, more insightful. If we can accept our imperfections as they are, quite ordinarily, then we can use them as part of the path. But if we try to get rid of our imperfections, then they will be enemies, obstacles on the road to our self-improvement.”