A good journey begins with knowing where we are
and being willing to go somewhere else
Richard Rohr
“My dear friend, has the most wonderful moment of your life arrived?“
He wants to know if the most wonderful moment of your life has arrived. It would be a pity if such a moment does not arrive. We may have a tendency to say “It does not seem that it has arrived, this wonderful moment, but I am sure that it will arrive soon, sometime in the future”. That’s our tendency to answer.
But if we keep living like the way we have lived for the past twenty years, it will not arrive in the next twenty years. It might not arrive at all, that moment we call the “most wonderful moment in our lives“.
The Buddha said, you have to make the present moment into the most wonderful moment of your life. And this is possible, Because if you are able to go home to the present moment, to the here and the the now, become fully alive, become fully present, you can touch all the wonders of life within yourself and around you.
Transcribed from a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh
As I grew up, I experimented with many traditional religious patterns. I soon discovered that, too often, form only has been preserved at the expense of content. Many “religious” people, as a result, are more interested in romantic projection and fulfilment of stereotypes than in learning the difficult self-forgetfulness of the exchange of Love with the Other.
They use religion to make themselves feel good, and call it the search for God. They invest all their energy to create a fantasy world where they will not experience any pain.
Maggie Ross, Seasons of Death and Life: A Wilderness Memoir