The Strawberry, Tigers, and Mice

You are going to die.

You've always known this. And you spend most of your waking hours doing everything you can to avoid thinking about it.

There's a story — one of Buddha's — that cuts straight through that avoidance.

A man is chased by a tiger to the edge of a cliff. He grabs a vine and swings over the edge. Below him, a second tiger waits. Above him, the first tiger paces. And at the top of the vine, two mice — one white, one black — gnaw steadily through the only thing keeping him alive.

He has no escape. No plan. No way forward. No way back.

Then he notices a single wild strawberry growing from a crack in the cliff face, just within reach.

He picks it. He eats it.

With everything falling apart around him — it's the sweetest thing he's ever tasted.

Not because the strawberry is extraordinary. But because, for once, he is entirely present in the moment for it.

Buddha never tells us whether the man survives. That silence is deliberate. Because the story was never about the tigers. It was about the one moment in that man's life when he stopped running from what was true — and let himself be where he was.

The tigers were always there. The running just meant he never tasted the strawberry.

This is where suffering actually lives. Not in the difficult thing itself. In the frantic, exhausting resistance to it. The loop that keeps running. The nervous system that never gets the signal that it's safe to stop.

That's what I work with. Not the tigers — but the running pattern underneath them.

Because when that pattern shifts, everything shifts.

The ordinary details of an ordinary moment — a cup of tea, a breath of cold air, a view through a window — can finally land. This is what mindfulness is.

The mice are chewing. They always were.

The only question is whether you're present enough to taste what's right in front of you.