Two friends, Hira and Mani, were sent into a great mango orchard at harvest time. "Pick all day," the orchard-keeper told them. "Do good work. The mangoes are not yours to keep — they go to the village storehouse. But the picking itself is yours to do well."

Mani heard only one thing: the mangoes are not mine to keep. From the first hour he was miserable. With every fruit he set in the basket, he thought, this could be mine, and it is going away. His hands grew tight. He picked quickly, roughly, bruising the fruit, his jaw clenched. By afternoon his shoulders ached and his heart ached more, and he counted every mango as a loss.

Hira heard the other thing: the picking itself is yours to do well. She let the mangoes go even as she picked them. She did not think about the storehouse at all. She felt the warm skin of each fruit, the snap of the stem, the cool shade of the leaves. She hummed. When a basket was full she carried it lightly to the cart and came back for more, and the work flowed through her like a stream through open hands.

At dusk the orchard-keeper found them. Mani sat slumped against a tree, exhausted and sour, his baskets full but his spirit knotted. "I gave all day," he muttered, "and got nothing."

Hira was still humming as she set down her last basket. Her arms were tired, but her face was bright and easy.

"You picked the same number of mangoes," the orchard-keeper said, looking from one to the other. "But you, Mani, carried every fruit twice — once in your hands, and once in your wanting. That second weight is what bent your back. And you, Hira, carried each only once, and let it go. That is why you stand light at the end of a long day."

He plucked a single ripe mango and pressed it into Hira's palm. "Peace," he said, "is not the reward at the end of the work. It is what you feel while you work, when you have stopped trying to keep the fruit."