Tag: impermanence

Knowing when to let go

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Don’t push the river,

it flows by itself.

Chinese Proverb

All make mistakes

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I often think of the way the Dakotah Indians responded to a small wrong. When, for example, a young person walked between an elder and the fire – an act of profound impoliteness in their culture – the young person said, simply, “Mistake”. It was an honest acknowledgement of an error of judgment, devoid of any self-recrimination or self-diminution. All present nodded in assent, and life went on.

How healthy such an attitude seems. We all commit mistakes in judgment and we all need forgiveness. If we had the option of making a simple acknowledgement of our mistake and then going on with affairs, how much clearer and gentler life would be. And how healthier would our own hearts be if we looked on the injuries caused us by others as  simply the mistake of human beings who, like us, are struggling to get by in a complex and mysterious world.

Kent Nerburn, Make me an Instrument of Your Peace

Our choices

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control.

Where will I find good and bad?

In me, in my choices.

Epictetus, Greek Stoic philosopher, 55 – 135

Letting go of the desire to control

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We can feel the possibility of balance in our lives,

when we recognize that life is not in our control

Jack Kornfield

Wide enough

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The peace that we are looking for is not peace that crumbles as soon as there is difficulty or chaos. Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises.

Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.

Pema Chodron 

Impermanence and beauty

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

It’s true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,
That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things,
the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,
the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,
And their frayed loveliness.

Charles Wright, American poet, 1935 – , Lonesome Pine Special

(Kenko, 1284 – 1350, Buddhist monk, author of Essays in Idleness)