Tag: Be fully present

Sunday Quote: Start over

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You will be shown the way forward when your wagon is overturned

Babylonian Proverb

Moments in themselves

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Psychologist Steve Taylor recalls watching tourists in the British Museum in London who weren’t really looking at the Rosetta Stone…on display in front of them , so much as preparing to look at it later, by recording images and videos on their phones. So intently were they focusing on using their time for a future benefit – for the ability to revisit or share the experience later on – that they were barely experiencing the exhibition itself at all. Of course, grumbling about young peoples smartphone habits is a favourite pastime of middle-aged curmudgeons like Taylor and me. But his deeper point is that we are all frequently guilty of something similar. We treat everything we’re doing – life itself in other words – as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.

from the always interesting Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to LIve it

Like a little fish

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There is a Hindu story about a little fish who went to the Queen of fishes to ask a question. She asked “I have heard of the Great Ocean; mighty and powerful, sustaining all who dwell therein, universally present, yet deep and fathomless. Where is this Great Ocean, and how do I find it?” The Queen replied, “The Great Ocean is everywhere, all around you, within and without. It is sustaining you even now. You exist within it and because of it, and need only accept yourself as you are to know it fully.”

We, like the little fish, exist within enlightenment all the time, unaware of its workings.

There is only one thing to do when we realize we cannot swallow the sea; relax, let go, and simply be one with it. How enjoyable that is! Our relationship to it changes, and it becomes much more personal.

Kyogen Carlson, 1982-2014, Zen Roots

Whatever experience

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Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.

How do you know this is the experience you need?

Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.

Eckhart Tolle

A flexible identity

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In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity.

It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure who we are, or who anyone else is, either.


Pema Chodron

What do you want

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And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved,
to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver, written during his last, terminal, illness