Let the journey teach you

If you feel like you’re running out of time, read this: You’re not. This is just the story we’ve been sold, and it has become the shadow that lingers over everything we do.

Your life shouldn’t feel like a race, because it isn’t one. Where there are fast days, there should be slow days that follow, days where you can reflect and recalibrate because everything you are going through right now is preparing you for the next chapter, every challenge directly informing the decisions that you’re about to make for yourself.

Being present will show you what is worth taking with you along the way as you navigate life because the destination won’t bring you peace unless you let the journey teach you who you are, and just how much capacity you have to experience change, both within yourself and in the world.

You aren’t running out of time, so don’t be afraid to slow down. Things fall into place when we create space for them to.

Şeyda Noir, Australian–Cypriot writer and poet.

Already there

A reminder: meditation is not an activity. Its not something you do, its not another thing on the list.

Its a stopping of activity, it’s a returning to this home base, to our very own existence, that we totally ignore almost all our lives unless we remember not to.

We shouldn’t really call it meditation, perhaps non-meditation would be better.

It’s a return to what’s already here before we’ve done anything.

Henri Shukman

When Everything Feels Urgent

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.

If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Sunday Quote: Compassion

If you’re a stranger to your own wound,

then you’re gonna be tempted to despise the wounded.

Fr Gregory Boyle

New every moment

It is only because our life is so habitually and so firmly based on a mechanical understanding that we think that our everyday life is repetitious.

But it is not so. No one can repeat the same thing.

Whatever you do, it will be different from what you do in the next moment.

That is why we should not waste our time

Shunryu Suzuki.

The reality of cycles

It is important to focus on the reality of cycles.

Good follows bad and bad follows good. Life is a series of ups and downs. It is important not to identify with the ups and downs of life; rather we must learn how to step outside ourselves and just notice.

We must not be attached to the good; we must not be depressed by the bad.

The ups and downs are just part of the flow of life.

Susan Jeffers, Embracing Uncertainty