The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself — forget definition, forget assumption, watch.
We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.
No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous.
Marilynne Robinson, 1943 – , American novelist and essayist, Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred
The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.
Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful…
How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow?
It is natural – you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.
Thich Nhat Hahn
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world
Mary Oliver
The Himalayan legend says
there are beautiful white birds
that live completely in flight.
They are born in the air,
must learn to fly before falling
and die also in their flying.
Maybe you have been born
into such a life
with the bottom dropping out.
Maybe gravity is claiming you
and you feel
ghost-scripted.
For the one who lives inside the fall,
the sky beneath the sky of all.
Jennifer K Sweeney, In Flight
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
If you discover a very thick and deep shadow,
be sure that there is, somewhere within you, a great light.
You must learn to use one to reach the other.
Mirra Alfassa, 1878 – 1973, collaborator of Sri Aurobindo
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