The things that matter are unfinished paintings that everyone creates and no one owns. Rather we are created each time we touch the breath of being, and we are connected to everyone who ever lived each time we add a stroke. And sometimes we are briefly aware that we are living parts of the most elemental community of all, the community of life force that moves through everything.
Mark Nepo, The Unfinished Painting
The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha thought, not edifying.
One must immerse oneself into the river of life and let the question drift away.
Irvin Yalom, The Gift of Therapy
Do the best you can, until you know better.
Then when you know better, do better.
Maya Angelou
AS humans we instinctively turn away from what we find difficult, or are impatient for difficult moments to pass:
In a dream, I was working hard to finish a bridge to cross some river whose current was strong. Just as I finished the arc of the bridge, an elephant appeared in the water. It was stepping down the middle of the stream. When it was squarely beneath my unfinished bridge, it stopped to douse itself with water…All at once, the sheen of water on its back made me question why I was building a bridge in the first place. It made me question if what I was crossing really needed to be entered. It made me wonder: If I were to enter the stream rather than cross it, would I have a different sense of where I was going?
In the days since the dream, the image of the elephant under the unfinished bridge has made me consider obstacles differently. Now when I stumble before things I don’t understand, I try to remember the elephant dousing itself in the middle of what I thought I had to cross and ask myself: Is the thing in the way something I need to cross or enter? If it’s a difficulty involving love or fear, where will I be led by crossing it? Where will I be led by entering it? At each turn, I find myself needing to know: What must I face and what must I bridge?
Mark Nepo
Limp along until your legs are spent, and you fall flat and your energy is drained.
Then the grace of the Divine will lift you.
Rumi
Feelings are often born from a matrix of conditions beyond your control. Just as you can’t control the weather or your boss’s mood, you can’t control the feelings in your body. They are just passing through, like clouds in the sky. They too, dissipate o n their own.
But if you take them not too seriously and start internalizing them as part of your identity, then you will resuscitate them every time you think about the past. Remember you are neither your feelings nor the story your mind tells about you to make sense of them. You are the vast silence that knows of their emergence and their disappearance.
Haemin Sunim, The Things you can See only when You Slow Down
