
The fool,
with all his other faults, has this also,
he is always getting ready to live.
Seneca, quoting Epicurus in Letters from a Stoic
{Please note: I apologize if you have gotten one or two strange posts over the past week, both times on a Friday morning. It is the first time in 15 years that something like this has happened and It seems random. I will check in with WordPress to find an explanation
Just to reiterate: I post just once a day around 5.00 am Central European Time. Although frequently requested, there are never any links in my posts, no endorsements or any commercial activity]
Back to more important matters…
It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life
waiting to start living.
Eckhart Tolle
There is always a lot of advice around this time about the importance of starting something new, and becoming better, which can give rise to a “fixing” mentality
The place to observe nature is where you are:
the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday.
You will not find just the same things.
John Burroughs 1837–1921, American naturalist and writer, Signs and Seasons
“My dear friend, has the most wonderful moment of your life arrived?“
He wants to know if the most wonderful moment of your life has arrived. It would be a pity if such a moment does not arrive. We may have a tendency to say “It does not seem that it has arrived, this wonderful moment, but I am sure that it will arrive soon, sometime in the future”. That’s our tendency to answer.
But if we keep living like the way we have lived for the past twenty years, it will not arrive in the next twenty years. It might not arrive at all, that moment we call the “most wonderful moment in our lives“.
The Buddha said, you have to make the present moment into the most wonderful moment of your life. And this is possible, Because if you are able to go home to the present moment, to the here and the the now, become fully alive, become fully present, you can touch all the wonders of life within yourself and around you.
Transcribed from a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh