Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one right way is all that is allotted to us. Certainty is a subtle destroyer…
John O Donohue, Eternal Echoes
Happiness,
not in another place, but this place . . .
not for another hour, but this hour.
Walt Whitman
Mysteriously, wonderfully,
I bid farewell to what goes, I greet what comes;
for what comes cannot be denied, and what goes cannot be detained.
Zhuang Zhou, 4th Century BCE
I don’t want to get to the end of my life
and find that I have lived just the length of it.
I want to have lived the width of it as well.
Diane Ackerman, 1948, American poet, essayist, and naturalist
Your brain is not designed to make you happy.
That’s your job.
Tony Robbins
We humans have a tendency to lean into the future or to seek something “more exciting” than what is in front of us. The challenge is to be fully awake and fully invested in the completeness of the present moment.
The moon and the sun are eternal travellers.
Even the years wander on.
A lifetime adrift in a boat or old age leading a tired horse into the years,
every day is a journey and the journey itself is home
Matsuo Basho, 17th century Japanese poet, Narrow Road to the Interior.
Mindfulbalance 