Let go

Try to go a whole seven days without having to control everything, without stressing when things don’t work out as you thought they would or should. As you do this, any time you feel the need to take charge, try to relax out of it, just to see what happens. Look for the good that happened precisely because things didn’t work out the way you thought they would or should.

And take your time. There really is no desperate hurry. When we constantly pursue perfection, our life speeds up. We make hasty decisions and snap judgments…. You’ll likely feel relived, and make better choices.

Beth Kempton, Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect life

Untroubled

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit.

The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Sunday quote: Wind

The plants and flowers
I raised about my hut
I now surrender
To the will
Of the wind

Ryokan 1758 – 1831, Zen Buddhist poet

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Give yourself to the air

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy.
You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Rilke, You who let yourselves feel

Becoming

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.

  Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.

This is a kind of death.

Anais Nin

Meet it and live it

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.…The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden