What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it.
In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.
Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are
Rilke, Letters
Cold nights followed by wind and rain. Grey winter weather causing colds and flu, as the holiday season is well and truly over.
Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.
Maya Angelou
We are coming up to that time of year when resolutions are encouraged and this can sometimes lead to a desire to fix ourselves and becoming dissatisfied with our life:
We are born with only one obligation – to be completely who we are. Yet how much of our time is spent comparing ourselves to others, dead and alive? This is encouraged as necessary in the pursuit of excellence. Yet a flower in its excellence does not yearn to be a fish, and a fish in its unmanaged elegance does not long to be a tiger. But we humans find ourselves always falling into the dream of another life. Or we secretly aspire to the fortune or fame of people we don’t really know. When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own. Yet when we compare ourselves to others, we see neither ourselves nor those we look up to. We only experience the tension of comparing, as if there is only one ounce of being to feed all our hungers.
Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening
Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.
Ajahn Sumedho
The present moment is never unbearable if you live in it fully.
What is unbearable is to have your body here at 10 A.M. and your mind at 6 P.M.
your body in Bombay and your mind in San Francisco.
Anthony de Mello, sj, The Heart of the Enlightened
Most of us are not open most of the time, we pretend that we are open, but mostly you’re running your own dramatic event of which you are the hero or the heroine. Usually that’s what we are doing most of the time.
The youth stops being so important, you’re too tired to maintain the hero that you think you are or the failure that you think you are, whatever the version of yourself that you bought into is — “I’m this failure, I’m not enough, or I’m this” … I’m more than anybody understands.
Those versions of yourself are not very useful.
Leonard Cohen, on what he learnt in his time in a Zen Monastery
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