Year: 2021

Need to breathe

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world.

But you need to breathe.

And you need to be.


Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

The eight worldly winds

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Praise and blame,

gain and loss,

fame and disrepute,

pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind.

To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.

The Buddha

Running after something

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If you do not trust yourself completely, you will just hurriedly go along with whatever happens in all situations. You cannot be independent: all these myriad situations cause you to undergo changes.

If you were able to put a stop to the mentality in which every thought is running after something, then you would be no different from a Zen master or a Buddha.

Lin-chi Yixuan, died 866, founder of the Linji school of Chan Buddhism

Circles and figures of eight

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Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn;

that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; 

that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon,

and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson,  Circles

Everything is miraculous

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The great lesson from the true mystics, from the zen monks, from the humanistic and transpersonal psychologists, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s own back yard. This lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

Abraham Maslow

Being comfortable with the unknown

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Forget about life, forget about worrying about right and wrong.

Plunge into the unknown and the endless and find your place there.

Chuang Tzu,  Chinese philosopher, 4th century BC