Some people—I’ve heard tell—set goals and work toward them, and they probably get a lot more done than people who flap around in the breeze of life. They pass the bar. They work for social justice. They solve world hunger. They might even amass a fortune they have no idea what to do with, although—much like the quality of ambition itself—some people are just born with that.

I’m more of a flapper, myself. I figure the pursuit of achievement alone can never completely satisfy, because the pursuit itself is a goal, and there will always be one more thing. This might be a rationalization, though, for the fact that I have neither solved world hunger nor amassed a fortune. In any case, it’s how I’m wired. In fact I showed great promise in the field of underachievement from an early age.

But since things never go exactly as planned even in a deliberately-lived life, I maintain it’s a good thing to be flexible. Say we’re driving and happen to come upon a roadblock. We could fret and strategize how to get beyond it and push on in the direction we’ve set for ourselves. But maybe, sometimes, we should just get out of the car and have a look around. Maybe we’ll see a puddle. Maybe we’ll see something cool in the puddle, like a jolly ribbon of toad eggs. They’ll show up in water as shallow as a tire rut, and a more hopeful demonstration of pluck and good faith cannot be found. If you have never noticed a splendid spiral of toad potential in a puddle, you might be too busy.

It’s a blessed state, to not be so driven. It’s worth learning: things will not always go your way, and your serenity may depend on your resilience. And this is where your home printer comes in handy. Your home printer is a Buddhist and it has a lesson for you.

I get aggravated at my printer. It’s thwarty. And I’m not alone. In years gone by, the standard neighborhood conversation staple might have been something about the weather. Or the tomato crop. These days, people are more likely to inquire after the health of your printer. “Is yours working? If I send you something, could you print it out for me?” At any given time, only half of the printers on the block are working. That’s just the way it is, and nobody knows why.

Printers were such a novel and magical thing to have in your very own house, at first. Twenty years ago, people were crazy about them. Here we’d all finally gone digital and, theoretically, paperless, and suddenly everyone was buying paper at Costco in the convenient twenty-pound slab. There was a pent-up urge to print things at home. People quit telling jokes. Instead, they’d print off jokes for you.

Mostly people have quit doing that, but it’s probably because their printers aren’t working. And when I say they’re not working, I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with them; they’re not working in the sense that your brother-in-law living in the basement with the Xbox and the bag of chips isn’t working. They could, but they don’t.

My printer works a lot of the time, but I can’t count on it. Sometimes I hit “print” and my laptop goes blind. “I don’t see a printer anywhere,” it whines. Even though it’s ten feet away. I used to do things like re-enter my connection code on the printer with the little squishy button that you have to hit ten times to find the lower-case P, and then do that again for another twelve characters, but it didn’t seem to have any effect on the visibility of the printer to my laptop. Then I tried moving my laptop right next to the printer in case it was an issue of intimacy. Or nearsightedness. No go.

Then I tried going straight to unplugging the printer and plugging it back in again—the ultimate solution, which, for some reason, I never think of until I’ve consulted three youtube videos and a help site—and restarting my laptop. Unplugging is the computer equivalent of sending a child to their room to think about what they’ve done.

But that didn’t work either.

When unplugging doesn’t work, you are plumb at the mercy of the universe. You just have to hope you’ve lived a clean life and your devices can tell. There’s supposed to be artificial intelligence out there—could some of it be artificial emotional intelligence?

Finally I recognized, in a moment of what can only be called enlightenment, that my printer worked fine, but it might have other plans at the moment, and if I just ask it nicely to print, it would get around to it eventually. I learned this when I tried to run off fifty pages of a novel, to no avail, but the next morning all those pages were sitting in a neat stack on the output tray. Or, to be more precise,150 pages, reflecting the number of times I hit “Print, dagnabbit.”

That’s what I do now. “Print this,” I say to my printer, nicely, and then I walk away. When my printer finally detects signs of acceptance and serenity in me, perhaps hours later, I’ll get my pages.

Meanwhile, Look! Toad eggs!