The one who knows that enough is enough
will always have enough.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 46
You do learn some things just by doing them over and over and by getting old doing them. And one of them is, you really need less…
My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there. But if you listen, if you’re with it, he takes you with him. I think sometimes about old painters — they get so simple in their means. Just so plain and simple. Because they know they haven’t got time. One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.
Ursula LeGuin
Most of us believe that we will spend seventy, eighty, ninety or one hundred years on this planet and then we’ll be gone. But when we look deeply, we see this is a wrong perception.
Your lifespan is not limited to seventy, eighty, ninety or one hundred years and that is good news. Your body is not your self; you are much more than this body. You are life without boundaries.
We are not limited to our physical body, even when we are alive. We inter-are with our ancestors, our descendants, and the whole of the cosmos. We do not have a separate self. We are interconnected with all of life, and we, and everything, are always in transformation
Thich Nhat Hahn, How to live when a Loved One Dies