Wu Wei is like sailing a boat: you don’t push the river, you let it carry you. The skilled sailor adjusts the sails to the wind, but does not try to command the wind itself.
So too in life – true mastery comes not from struggle, but from harmonizing with the way things naturally unfold.
Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way
You will come across obstacles in life – fair and unfair.
And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure
Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way,
This morning, the sun rose without fanfare, yet it claimed the sky.
The light touches everything – the dew, the stone, the anxious heart – and whispers: You are seen. You are held.
It’s a beautiful day not because it’s perfect, but because within its hours lies the relentless, gentle persistence of grace.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community
To those who will come after, I say
Life is not for waiting.
Rumi, Gnostic Donkeys (2)
Almost no one is exempt from trauma. While some people have it in a more pronounced way than others, the unpredictable and unstable nature of things makes life inherently traumatic.
What the Buddha revealed through his dreams was that, true as this may be, the mind, by its very nature, is capable of holding trauma much the way a mother naturally relates to a baby.
One does not have to be helpless and fearful, not does one have to be hostile and self-reverential. the mind knows intuitively how to find a middle path. Its implicit relational capacity is hardwired
Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life
The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness.
Of these, only three involve misery or suffering.
Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.
Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
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