We dont know

Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that.

We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good.

But really we just don’t know.

Pema Chodron

Up hills and down valleys

Jung [said]..: “A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not yet discovered its meaning.” Notice that he does not rule out suffering, for suffering, the medieval adage had it, “is the fastest horse to completion.”

The clear implication of Jung’s position is that working through one’s way to meaning – that is, to an enlarged view of ones dilemma and perhaps to an enlarged view of one’s own summons – can lead one through the valley of the shadow.

James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom For the Second Half of the Journey.

(The interesting medieval idea he refers to is from Meister Eckhart: The quickest horse that carries you to perfection is suffering)

How to find where we are going

Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Thoreau, Walden