The Buddha taught that everything is impermanent – flowers, tables, mountains, political regimes, bodies, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.
We cannot find anything that is permanent.
Impermanence is more than an idea.
It is a practice to help us touch reality.
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
A rock and a flower are both worn by time
The rock is eroded, the flower unfolds.
One is broken down, the other breaks open
How will you meet your days?
Will you let them wear you away, or will you let them split you wide so that your color spills
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
My friend Jack Kornfield tells his story of asking a venerable Tibetan meditation teacher for advice many years ago: “There are so many students wanting to be on retreat,” Jack said to the teacher. “I’m teaching continuously, and I’m very tired.” Jack hoped, it seems, that he would be given a special practice for strength – perhaps a mantra. But the teacher said, “Maybe you should take more vacations.”
Almost everyone laughs when they hear that story. It’s funny because it isn’t the answer most people are expecting. It’s also good dharma: life is difficult, the Buddha taught, and it becomes more difficult when we struggle with it. There is no end to challenge. Not everything needs to get solved today.
Sylvia Boorstein, Just Don’t Do It
Do not become annoyed when faced with difficulties.
To do so merely adds difficulty to difficulty and further disturbs your mind.
By maintaining a mind of peace and non-opposition, difficulties will naturally fall away
Master Sheng-Yen
Almost every one of Odysseus’s encounters coming home from Troy are losses of some type – his men, his control, his power, his time, his memory, his fame, the boat itself. Falling, losing, failing, transgression and sin are the pattern, I am sorry to report.
Yet they all lead towards home.
In the end, we do not so much reclaim what is lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream
Richard Rohr, Falling Upward
Way back in the ’80s, my guru asked me, “What is stress?” He had never heard of stress because he came from the Himalayas. I told him stress is the perception of threat: physical, emotional and psychological. After a while, he said, “You mean resistance to existence.” And he said, “If you don’t resist existence, you will have flow.” That’s the best advice.
Deepak Chopra in Wall Street Journal, November 2024, Deepak Chopra Doesn’t Believe You’re Too Busy to Meditate
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