Asking for the impossible

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Whenever you experience any pain or difficulty, always remember one of the deep meanings of the word suffering: asking the world for something it can never give you. We expect and ask impossible things from the world. We ask for the perfect home and job and that all the things we work hard to build and arrange run perfectly at the right time and place. Of course, that is asking for something that can never be given. We ask for profound meditation and enlightenment, right here and now. But that’s not the way this universe works. If you ask for something that the world can’t supply, you should understand that you’re asking for suffering. So whether you work or meditate, please accept that things will go wrong from time to time. Your job is not to ask for things the world can’t give you. Your job is to observe.

Ajahn Brahm, It all goes wrong anyway

photo alejandrollinaresgarcia

The bare bones

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Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones:

Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time – that this the basic message

Pema Chodron

photo Immanuel giel

Being content with what we have

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The bird in a forest can perch but on one bough.

And this should be the wise man’s pattern.

Tso Ssu, Chinese poet, c 250 – 307

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Sunday Quote: Fully Living

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It is not death that one should be afraid of,

but rather never beginning to live

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.1.2

photo of sunrise at the Sugarloaf mountain,  Wicklow,  by rahulrana71

Not always a straight line

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The only people who ever get any place interesting

are the people who get lost.

Henry David Thoreau

photo tony atkin

In the small bits and pieces

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If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It’s that simple. What you see is what you get

Annie Dilliard

photo marilia melhado