Tag: Life

The best day

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Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The final Freedom

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We hurry through the so-called boring things in order to attend to that which we deem more important, interesting.

Perhaps the final freedom will be a recognition that everything in every moment is ‘essential’ and that nothing at all is ‘important.’

Helen M. Luke, 1904- 1995, Jungian therapist and writer

One purpose

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In the Sufi Master Rumi’s “Table Talk”, there is this fierce and pointed passage:

“The master said there is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but were not to forget this, there would be no cause to worry, while if you remembered, performed and attended to everything else, but forgot that one thing, you would in fact have done nothing whatsoever.

It is as if a king had sent you to a country to carry out one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all.

So each person has come into the world for a particular task, and that is their purpose. If they don’t perform it, they will have done nothing.

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,

Everyday

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Life does not get in the way

It is the way

Rebecca Li, Chan meditation teacher

Joy

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Every moment is a gift. … Whatever life gives to you, you can respond with joy.

Joy is the happiness that does not depend on what happens.

It is the grateful response to the opportunity that life offers you at this moment.

David Steindal-Rast osb

Having a happy life

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The trick to having a happy life is to remember that it all comes down to what we ourselves make of the life we have. 

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so, Ralph Waldo Emerson says, ” but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger and mosquitoes and silly people.”

Joan Chittister, The Monastic Way, June 2022