Once at a workshop, the instruction was to walk mindfully over to the lunchtime food across the room. In that short walk across the room, I noticed how automatically I get ahead of myself — how I lose track of these miraculous feet on the ground and miss the space in between. And I’m beginning to suspect that most of life is “in between“.
David Rynick, This Truth Never fails: A Zen memoir in Four Seasons
The pattern of things….is there from the start. Who you are is there from the beginning. Your task in life is to discern that pattern, listen for it, and give room for it to emerge. More commonly, though, we are all too busy trying to make things happen – to make ourselves happen. We may push and shove through most of a lifetime before realizing that another voice is whispering beneath the fret of our efforts and strategies.
Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life
Buddhism teaches that joy and happiness arise from letting go.
Please take an inventory of your life
There are things that you’ve been hanging on to that really are not useful and deprive you of your freedom
Find the courage to let them go.
Thich Nhat Hanh
A new month.
Because in the end you won’t remember the time spent working in the office or mowing your lawn.
Climb that goddamn mountain
Jack Kerouac
Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble at any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.
Naomi Shibab Nye, The Art of Disappearing [extract]
It is not easy to free ourselves from the counting, comparing mind.
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come.
It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 3
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