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Fri 12 Dec 2008Baking buns to forget the dwindling pennies in my piggy bank
DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:BEING EXCESSIVELY happy is a mixed blessing. There are frosty mornings on the streets of Mullingar, when red-nosed people are heading for work, and the canal is frozen solid beneath a cloudless sky, and I am almost unable to restrain my joy at being alive.
On such walks I ask myself the philosophical question with which a Mongolian teacher once challenged me: Who does your heart belong to in the morning? The Mongolian answer is that the heart's desire for other people, frosty mornings or apple tarts, only amounts to a heap of suffering. And the beauty of the day, or the beloved, should not allow the mind to become overexcited.
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