The aim of life is to live,
and to live means to be awake, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely awake.
Henry Miller
Sunday Quote: …and Awake
Tag: impermanence
Alive…
The first snowdrops in my garden, a very welcome sign of life in this pandemic winter.
If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us, as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.
Pablo Nerudo, Keeping Quiet
Always uncertain
The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future. We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it.)
It’s freeing to grasp that no amount of fretting will ever alter this truth. It’s still useful to make plans. But do that with the awareness that a plan is only ever a present-moment statement of intent, not a lasso thrown around the future to bring it under control. The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krisnamurti said his secret was simple: “I don’t mind what happens.” That needn’t mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped.
Oliver Burkeman, The eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life in The Guardian
Trust
If you surrender to the wind,
you can ride it
Toni Morison, American Novelist, 1931 – 2019
Just this moment
And without judging, condemning, forcing, blaming, just come back to this moment, this breath. Each breath, a new beginning. Each out breath, a complete letting go. And voila, here you are again, right here, and no agenda. Just this moment. Just this breath.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Worn down
The current of life requires us to stand up, again and again, and we are not defeated when we are worn down, just exposed anew at a deeper level. We are meant to live between the two. In this way, life keeps getting more and more precious. It is a natural law like gravity or osmosis: Stand up to be worn bare. It is how everything in the way is thinned, so we can feel just how thoroughly alive we are.
Mark Nepo
Mindfulbalance 