Is it a spiritual success to be calm when your website is down?
The meeting
I had a meeting with a very talented programming boss. He was the brightest and most on-the-ball guy I have ever met in my work. I know many bright people, but this guy had a type of focus that others just will never have. This meeting was an interview where I wanted to hire them for regular programming tasks in particular languages. During the interview my main site went down. My site is on a very difficult server, and it goes down every several weeks. I am used to it. I am not even phased. Sure, we get 7000 visits on a busy day, but this is what life is like. It is is down at 1pm, it will be back up soon after I send an email and a quick phone call. Wait and come back later. The programming boss was more concerned than I was about my site being down. I explained to him that I had just meditated for two hours at an ashram and that I was at one with the universe. Of course I care if my breadwinning site is down, but this is how life is, and my practice is to see if it is still down after 20 minutes, and then email tech support. He said that I needed to interrupt the meeting and deal with it right NOW!
Panic attacks!
I remember how my career in web business unfolded. How I started by bootstrapping, putting my pennies together. Getting a little help from my dad with some simplistic programming. My dad was a computer genious in his time, but that was with very different technology. Web technology is something he recently learned, but never mastered. I put together a site, and kept growing it. After three years it started making some money, then more, and more. I remember, how in those days, if my site went down, I would almost have a heart attack. I literally had anxiety attacks and panicked. Once my site was down for 24 hours due to a very nasty bug. I had some very reliable programmers taking care of me at the time, but I still was so nervous.
I have calmed down
Now, it is 12 years after the inception of my main site. I have calmed down a lot. If it goes down for an hour, I know how much it costs. I know how many pay-per-click dollars I lose. I know how it frustrates my users. I know how many angry emails I will get. I have gone through this so many times, that I am completely calm when my site goes down. The level of calmness is so striking considering how I used to be. So, when that programming boss told me that I should be upset that my site was down I thought about it. Looking back, sure I should get that site back online fast, but it is a sign of some great spiritual success from my 22 years of meditation to have such a deep inner calmness when problems arise.
Measuring spiritual progress
Spiritual progress is not something that regular humans can measure. Only the gurus have the right, or the ability to judge this. But, we can see signs of progress. It is foolish to judge a person by how they behave when things are good. See how they behave when something happens that upsets them. That is the true test.