A reminder to see each day as a gift to be celebrated:
God has given us the gift of life
It is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living fully
(Dieu nous a donné le vivre; c’est à nous de nous donner le bien vivre)
Voltaire, 1694–1778, French writer, philosopher and public activist, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire: melanges. commentaires sur corneille.
If we have little needs and much contentment,
we experience the wealth of the world around us,
and when we experience that wealth
there’s nothing we need to renounce
and nothing we need to add to it.
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel
A similar theme, this time from the Christian tradition:
Nothing lasts. No single thing can consume our entire life’s meaning. No single thing can give us total satisfaction. Nothing is worth everything: neither past, nor present nor future. It isn’t true that the loss of any single thing will destroy us. Everything in life has some value and life is full of valuable things, things worth living for, things worth doing, things worth becoming, things worth loving again. It is only a matter of being detached enough from one thing to be open to everything else.
The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us.
Joan Chittister, After Great Pain: Finding a Way Out
Sometimes I’d go to see old religious sites with ancient temple buildings, designed by architects, beautifully built by skilled craftsmen. In some places they would be cracked. Maybe one of my friends would remark, “Such a shame, isn’t it? It’s cracked. ” I’d say: “If that weren’t the case then there’d be no such thing as the Buddha, there’d be no Dharma. It’s cracked like this because it’s perfectly in line with the Buddha’s teaching.
Ajahn Chah
photo sookie
Most of us are very good at bringing suffering upon ourselves, by taking something that is happening and fixating on it, creating a worry and letting it take root inside us. We are less good at simply letting things be, without wanting to fix the world according to our preferences:
Sitting quietly,
doing nothing,
Spring comes,
and the grass grows,
by itself.
Matsuo Bashō, 1644 – 1694
Much of life is ruined for us by a blanket or shroud of familiarity that descends between us and everything that matters. It dulls our senses and stops us appreciating everything, from the beauty of a sunset to our work and our friends. Children don’t suffer from habit, which is why they get excited by some very key but simple things — like puddles, jumping on the bed, sand, and fresh bread. But we adults get ineluctably spoiled, which is why we seek ever more powerful stimulants, like fame and love.
The trick …. is to recover the powers of appreciation of a child in adulthood, to strip the veil of habit and therefore to start to look upon daily life with a new and more grateful sensitivity.
Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
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