This is the simple truth
– that to live is to feel oneself lost –
He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.
José Ortega y Gasset, Who Rules the World.
Tag: Life
Seeing life freshly
It’s a Bank Holiday, or long weekend, here in Ireland, so one immediately feels as if there is more time to slow down and take a break from the rushing which the working week inevitably impresses on the mind. A certain space enters, allowing us to see things more lightly, or to see them with eyes that have the room to appreciate them:
Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense.
Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.
Karl Rahner, Catholic Theologian, 1904 – , 1984
Always off balance
Heavy rain this morning in Ireland, after a bright autumn day yesterday. An easy lesson in the inevitability of change and that our real work lies in becoming familiar with movement, not in standing still. Moreover, this constant change allows us develop insight into another learning, namely that we should never expect to really arrive at a competed work and that, as Theologian Karl Rahner said, in this life “all symphonies remain unfinished”. Sitting with this allows us relax in the knowledge that things are never quite perfect, yet still can be complete for that moment:
We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled. In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as an alteration. ‘Yes,’ we say at the full brightness, ‘this is what I just meant.’ ‘No,’ we feel at the dawning, ‘this is not yet the full meaning, there is more to come.’ In every crescendo of sensation, in every effort to recall, in every progress towards the satisfaction of desire, this succession of an emptiness and fullness that have reference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of the phenomenon
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
We just don’t know
Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know
Pema Chödrön, When things Fall Apart
A new week begins
Keep in mind that no matter how badly you feel things have been going, no matter how long it has been since you last meditated, you can always begin again. Nothing is lost; nothing is ruined. We have this very moment in front of us. We can start now
Sharon Salzberg
Letting time be
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)
