Tag: Life

The art of stopping

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don’t know where we are going, and we can’t stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves…We have to learn the art of stopping – stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us.

Thich Nhat Hahn, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching

Lacking

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Craving leads to suffering whenever we fail to see that what we crave won’t really provide us with the kind of lasting satisfaction or happiness that we are seeking. The nature of craving is not to be satisfied. It is about lack. When we get stuck in this place of lacking something that we believe will bring us happiness, then we can really suffer.

Walt Opie

A time for slow replenishment

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They adapt. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty…. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it’s essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.

It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.

Katherine May, Wintering: How I Learned to Flourish When Life Became Frozen 

Rushing to do everything

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress – in the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future – they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future. And so they try to quell their anxieties by cramming their lives with experience.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use it

Patience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Qualities to keep the heart open: Be as patient as the moss and as vulnerable as the oaks. 

Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about

spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Mary Oliver, Landscape (extract)

The disease of our age

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns,

to surrender to too many demands,

to commit oneself to too many projects,

to want to help everyone in everything

is to succumb to the violence of our times.

Thomas Merton