The distance doesn’t matter;
it is only the first step that counts
La distance n’y fait rien; il n’y a que le premier pas qui coûte.
Marquise du Deffand, 1697 – 1780, French hostess and patron of the arts. She was commenting on the popular legend of Saint Denis who was said to have walked for 6 miles carrying his head after being beheaded.
A common man marvels at uncommon things.
A wise man marvels at the commonplace.
Confucius
Strong winds are predicted for this weekend, the tail-end of an Atlantic storm…
Time and again I was seeing that if I could handle the winds of the current storm, they would end up blowing in some great gift… Challenging situations create the force needed to bring about change. The problem is that we generally use all the stirred up energy intended to bring about change, to resist change. I was learning to sit quietly in the midst of the howling winds and wait to see what constructing action was being asked of me.
Michael SInger, The Surrender Project
What does wakefulness mean? It means resting in a kind of awareness that is so stable that it’s not thrown off by the comings and goings of events within the field of awareness. So that you don’t lose your balance when things go this way and things go that way, but you actually stay grounded when things go your way, as we put it. And when things don’t go your way, it doesn’t mean that you have to rocket yourself or spiral into depression and hopelessness and a sense of despair. But very often if we take it personally and we feel like our successes say that we’re a good person and then, by extrapolation, our failures say that there’s something wrong with me, that I’m no good. And both of those are wrong. What goes up also comes down, whether we’re talking about the stock market or a ball that you throw up in the air. And if you mistake what you think of as the reality for the reality, then you’re going to suffer because you’re attaching the story of me, myself, and my successes and my failures to something that’s actually quite impersonal.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Interview with Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it, rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire……. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
For to know nothing is nothing,
not to want to know anything likewise,
but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything,
that is when peace enters in.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
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