My dear Lucilius, begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
The one who has thus prepared himself, whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind; but those who live for hope alone find that the immediate future always slips from their grasp.
Seneca
This is the simple truth
– that to live is to feel oneself lost –
He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.
José Ortega y Gasset, Who Rules the World.
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel the silent and invisible life.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.
Mary Oliver, from Mornings at Blackwater
Its only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly.
That again is part of this paradox.
You cannot rip away caterpillarness.
The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
Ram Dass
Sometimes we build a reality out of our greatest fears or anticipate the worst of others, when the reality is far from what we have constructed:
Unaware that our stories are stories, we usually experience them as the world. Like fish that do not see the water they swim in, we normally do not notice the medium we dwell within. We take for granted that the world we experience is just the way things are. But our concepts and ideas about the world, like the stories they are part of, strongly affect our perception of reality. In … practice, one learns, early on and then continually, the truth of my favorite bumper sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
David Loy, The World Is Made of Stories
Mindfulbalance 