Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you.
It is trust, not certainty
Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being
Tag: impermanence
Letting go of expectations
Equanimity balances the giving of your heart’s love with the recognition and acceptance that things are the way they are.
However much you may care for someone, however much you may do for others, however much you would like to control things (or wish that they were other than they are) equanimity is a reminder that all beings everywhere are responsible for their own actions, and for the consequences of their actions. Equanimity will allow you to open your heart and offer love, kindness, compassion, and joy, while letting go of your expectations and attachment to results. Equanimity gives you the energy to persist, regardless of the outcome, because you will be connected to the integrity of the effort itself.
Frank Jude Boccio, Calm Within
Problems and inconveniences
One of life’s best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference.
Robert Fulghum, American author and Unitarian Minister, Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door
Necessary for beauty
More wisdom from Dogen. I really like this saying:
Without the bitterest cold that penetrates to the very bone,
how can plum blossoms send forth their fragrance all over the world?
Dogen, Buddhist monk and philosopher, founder of the Soto school of Zen, 1200 – 1253,
Saturday: rest and time
God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body like the hands of my beloved.
Mary Oliver, Sometimes.
Emerging and disappearing
Feelings are often born from a matrix of conditions beyond your control. Just like you can’t control the weather, or 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 on their own. But if you take them too seriously and start internalizing them as part of your identity, then you will resuscitate them every time you think about the past. Remember that 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
Mindfulbalance 