Mindfulbalance

It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you.

It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed.

We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.

John O’ Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty,

If one knew oneself to be precious,
One would guard oneself with care.
A wise person will watch over herself
In any part
Of the night.

Dhammapada, verse 157,

Read no newspapers.

Try to find a few friends who think as you do;

Read the wonderful writers of earlier times – Kant, Goethe, Lessing – and the classics of other lands;

Enjoy the natural beauties of your surroundings.

Make friends with a few animals.

Then you will become a cheerful man once more, and nothing will be able to trouble you

Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone – and necessarily so – and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.

Albert Einstein, letter of 5 April 1933 to a troubled, unemployed musician living in Munich who was fearful of the rise of fascism around him.

You may say, “I must do something this afternoon,” but actually there is no “this afternoon.”

We do things one after the other.

That is all.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Breathing