Over the last few weeks, I've been talking a lot about doing - doing the right thing, taking action beyond your comfort zone, doing your very best, mindfully. Taking action. Meditation is not the kind of action that I'm talking about. Meditation is, if you will, pre-action - it enables you take right action, effectively, effortlessly. Meditation is training to act - not the action itself.

Meditation is a tool - the very best power tool that you'll find in the hardware store - but a tool nevertheless. Nobody pays a highly-skilled cabinet-maker because he owns a power tool - they pay him for what he does with his power tool - the effortless, effective and highly-skilled actions that he can take because he has armed himself with that power tool. In other words, you need to arm yourself with the power tool of meditation but, once suitably armed, you need to deploy in the cut and thrust of your daily life... to take right action.

Right action - the key things that you need to do to achieve your dearly-held goals and objectives - is not only enabled by meditation, meditation also enables you take right action, in the right way, at the right time. In flow, you do things at the right time, in the right order and you do them with little effort. You don't think about doing things - you know what the right things to do are and you go and do them. This paints a starkly constrasting picture to the normal way of making it through the day - where I do what's in front of me, even if that happens to have nothing to do with either what I'm supposed to be doing or what I'm trying to achieve. Filling my day with mindless nonsense is how most of us make it through the day... and why most people don't like what they're doing (or, actually, supposed to be doing!).

So, meditation makes you fit for purpose - the purpose that you must have in mind in order to be fully prepped for right action. I hope that sorts out any confusion that you might have had!

It's hard to know what's going on in normal people's minds. Inevitably, because of how we're wired, what's going on in our minds right now has little to do with reality - unless, of course, we've taken the small trouble to engage our minds in the now and put them to work for us.

Hanging around an airport is a great place to do just that. Therefore, when my homeward flight from the US was delayed for four hours last week, I had an unrivalled opportunity for people watching. OK, half the people at the departute gate got their assorted underwear in a tangle - with reactions ranging from mild tantrums to rage - as if any of that nonsense would make an aircraft, at that point in time only halfway across the Atlantic, materialize at the departure gate. It was, quite simply, what it was - nothing to be done but roll with the punches.

So, I treated myself to a nice big meal - or, at least, a big meal! As I sat in the restuarant waiting for my meal to arrive, I was gently tapped on the shoulder by an apparently sensible woman who was sitting at the next row of tables, with her back to me, looking across the airfield.

"Can you help me, sir?" she enquired. "I don't know" I replied "You tell me!". She asked me if I saw a large cloud of smoke rising across the far side of the airfield and if she was correct in assuming that there was a fire. Sure enough, someone was burning their garden waste! - a minor trickle of smoke. However, she then said: "I do hope it's not my flight to Heathrow that has crashed!" How do you answer that?