After spending two days sitting on the floor of a shopping mall in Kansas City, Missouri, arranging colored sand into an intricate design called a mandala, eight Tibetan monks called it a day and went home. A short time later a woman and her young son showed up. She went to the post office in the hall while the boy decided to do a dance on the pretty sand, obliterating the design. The monks took it in true Buddhist stride. “No problem,” the leader of the group said. “We didn’t get despondent. We have three days more. So we will have to work harder. We hope the boy will enjoy his next life as a three-legged dung beetle that gets eaten alive by a swarm of African ants. Slowly. Very slowly.”