Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t – and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Staying with the unknown
Tag: Courage
Begin
To know what you’re going to draw,
you have to begin drawing.
Picasso
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Wings will be given
You are uneasy riding the body?
Dismount. Travel lighter. Wings will be given.
Be clear like a mirror, reflecting nothing.
Be clean of pictures and the worry that comes with images.
Gaze into what is not ashamed or afraid of any truth.
Contain all human faces in your own without any judgment of them.
Be pure emptiness.
What is inside that? you ask. Silence is all I can say.
Lovers have some secrets That they keep.
Rumi
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Not who we are
The transformation of fear does not mean that we no longer have fearful responses. It means that we no longer believe that those responses are who we are. This is what practice is about: learning to stop believing that our deep-seated reactivity is who we are. Who we really are is much bigger than any of our fear-based conditioned responses. When we can really experience fear, we can see through this false identification, perhaps even glimpsing a vaster sense of Being.
Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
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Make a start
It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought:
which is why we so often prefer to live in an almost world, why we prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities to be safely clouded by fear, why we want the horizon to remain always in the distance, the promise never fully and simply made, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.
David Whyte “Beginning” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
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Courage
There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us:
we suffer more often in imagination than in reality
Seneca the Younger, Letters from a Stoic
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