“Perhaps it is only those who understand just how fragile life is who know how precious it is. Taking life seriously does not mean spending our whole lives meditating as if we were living in the mountains in the Himalayas or in the old days in Tibet. In the modern world, we have to work and earn a living, but we should not get entangled in the nine-to-five existence, where we live without any view of the deeper meaning of life. Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overstretch ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. In Buddhism this is what is really meant by discipline.”
-from ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’ by Sogyal Rinpoche