Once in a while
I just let time wear on,
leaning against a
solitary pine
standing speechless…
as does the whole universe!
Ah, who can share
this solitude with me?
Ryokan (1758 – 1831)
Tag: Joy
Not aiming
Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Be Happy
One of my meditation teachers used to end each of our interviews … and say to me, “Remember, Sylvia, be happy.” I actually for a long time thought it was a salutation, like “have a good day” or something that you say just in a routine kind of a way, and it took me a long time to realize that it was an instruction, “Be happy.” Not only that it was an instruction but that it was a wisdom transmission – that happiness was a possibility. I understand that happiness to mean, the happiness of a mind that’s alert, that’s awake to the amazing potential of being a person in a life, with a mind that’s opened, that sees everything that’s going on, and realizes what an amazing possibility this is, and with a heart that’s open, the heart that responds naturally as hearts do, in compassion, in connection with friendliness, with love, with consolation when it needs to: That that’s the happiness of life – a mind that’s awake, a heart that’s engaged.
Sylvia Boorstein, Stanford Keynote Speech, 2005
photo joe sarembe
How we grow
How did the rose
ever open his heart
and give to this world all its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light
against its being,
otherwise, we will remain too frightened
Hafiz
photo Amada44
Just dance
Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right.
Just dance
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life
photo quinn anya
When Taps leak, and other things go wrong
The moment in which the mind acknowledges ‘This isn’t what I wanted, but it’s what I got’, is the point at which suffering disappears. Sadness might remain present, but the mind … is free to console, free to support the mind’s acceptance of the situation, free to allow space for new possibilities to come into view.
Sylvia Boorstein, Happiness is an Inside Job
