How do you develop a heart limitless not just in its compassion, but also in its endurance? Well, paradoxically it’s by focusing on little things and having the right attitude toward little things.

 "Reflect on that passage in the chant we recited just now: “Cultivate a limitless heart.” A limitless heart is expansive and doesn’t see things just from a narrow perspective. It has to take a wider perspective. In other words, our individual issues are not the only issues in the world. The people around us have issues, too. And we have to have some compassion for them. At the same time, they can be very irritating people. For that we need a heart limitless not just in its compassion, but also in its endurance.

How do you develop that? Well, paradoxically it’s by focusing on little things and having the right attitude toward little things.

To begin with, some things are little but you tend to see them as big — bigger than they really are. It takes some effort to see that they’re actually little and minor and that your heart is much bigger.

Think of that passage in the sutta where the Buddha says to make your mind like earth. Someone can come and spit and urinate on the earth and dig around in the earth to try to make the earth not earth or to be without earth, but that person’s efforts are really small and pitiful, because the earth is just so huge. “Make your mind like space.” People can try to write and draw pictures on space but there’s no surface on space, so the pictures have nowhere to stick. “Make your mind like the River Ganges.” It’s a huge river. Someone could take a torch and try to burn up the river but he’d never be able to burn away even a little bit of it. You want to make the mind that impervious, that solid.

This is an issue of endurance. Patience. It’s important to see that patience and endurance are very intimately connected with goodwill [mettā]: You can maintain your goodwill because you can put up with a lot of the stuff that’s out there in the world and it doesn’t make you wish ill for anyone.

We don’t pretend that the people around us or in the world at large are all wonderful, that they’re all well-intentioned. They’re not. People have all kinds of intentions, and we can’t be responsible for or control their intentions. But we can be responsible for our own intentions, and we can make our mind large. We wish them goodwill not because they’re good but because we want to master the power of endurance so that the things that other people do to us are not going to have that much of an impact and persuade us to do unskillful things.

So those are the types of little things that you want to keep little: the things other people do, that they say, the way they infringe on your boundaries, where they go against your idea of how things should be done. Learn to regard those actions with some compassion; learn to regard them with some endurance. Don’t let little things like that blow up to become big things. Little issues that would destroy the harmony of the group: Keep them little and make your heart large so that you can endure them.

There are other little things, though, that you tend to overlook because they seem so minor, and yet you really should focus on them — because this power of endurance, this limitless heart, doesn’t start at the edge of the universe and work in. It starts here and moves out.

One way of starting here is to look around you and see what needs to be done. There are lots of little things in the monastery that are not assigned as tasks. We each have our own duties, but don’t think that just doing your duty is enough and then you can go back to your hut, go back to your tent, and shut out everything else. Sometimes you look around and see that something a little extra needs to be done. So you do that. Then you go back to meditate.

There’s a rainstorm forecast for tonight. One of the things you should do is look around you. What needs to be put away, what needs to be fixed, in case there’s rain? Or when you walk down the road and there are some weeds by the side of the road — and as a monk I can’t tell you to pull out the weeds — but the weeds are there and, as they say, you can contemplate them. You don’t have to wait for someone else to tell you.

Paying attention to little things like this makes life a lot easier for everybody else around. Little things you can do for people, behind their backs, the nice things: Those really make the life at the monastery a lot more pleasant for everyone."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Cultivate a Limitless Heart" (Meditations8)