How far is enlightenment

Let me tell a story. Once I lived in a beautiful city. I was leading a wonderful life in my beautiful home and had a job of my dreams. Suddenly, I came to know that I had to relocate to another city leaving back all my belongings there. I didn't have a home in the other city and the job was also not so good. I was bombarded with thousands of thoughts. Oh! I loved my job. I was touching skies there. I will never see my friends again. Suddenly the whole life would change. What about my belongings. I couldn't carry them along. Why did this all happen? I was miserable.

Just then an idea came. I closed my eyes - "Well, what will happen if I die right at this moment?" There was a balloon filled with all these thoughts. It was like a dark heavy cloud filled with worries of my belongings, my reputation, and my attachments. You know what, that dark cloud was me. "Noo! I don't want to die like that." Too scared, I opened my eyes.

"Woof, I will anyways lose all these things if I die right now. But I am just moving to another location and I can carry some of my belongings along as well. So, it's not that bad. Ahh!" I felt much better. A small idea, a thought, totally changed the state of my mind.

In a flash of a moment, I realized how far I was to that constant state of peace, probably called enlightenment. It is always just a cloud away. The cloud of thoughts. In that very instance, my heavy dark cloud of thoughts had turned into a light blue cloud with the help of another thought. But it is not the same always. The clouds are ever floating and really cannot be measured. We have to go beyond these thoughts and reach the peaceful state and stay there. Until then, the density of these clouds cannot be measured.

But I wonder who control these thoughts. Or, can they be controlled at all? Definitely, our actions and emotions are driven by thoughts but who is driving the thoughts. How many times have you felt that before the song started on radio, you started humming it? Was the song in the air already and your mind just tunned to it before the radio could. Would that mean that our frequency analyzer is better than that of the radio! The thoughts are also just floating like that song in the space around us. And we keep catching on to them randomly. The thoughts can simply pass by, like clouds, but amazing is our potential to hang on to them. We can make our lives miserable or happy based on our talent of holding on to the thoughts. The more talented we are, more miserable our lives can be. But blessed are those who can just watch the thoughts passing by and enjoy them as they would enjoy listening to a song.