Tag: Present moment

Meet it and live it

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However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.…The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Autumn Clouds

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This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds,
Watching the birth and death of beings is like looking at movements of a dance,
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.

The Buddha, Lalitavistara Sutra, 13.79

The direction of life

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“I’ve known rivers,” writes Langston Hughes. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers“.

Am I going to flow with my river nature today, or am I going to swim against it? this is what I ask myself when I get out of bed each morning. And when I go to sleep, I apologize to the river gods for any hard strokes I made against the current, and for splashing about like a drowning person. I pray that tomorrow I may once again know the pleasure of following my soul downstream, because I’ve known rivers- and once we’ve known rivers, once we have stretched out on the dark waters, trusting the river gods, going in the direction of life even if it is headfirst toward the rapids – we want to taste that water again;

we want our souls to grow deep like the rivers again.

Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How difficult times can help us grow

What troubles us

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If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry.

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist

Different channels

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Recently, one friend asked me, “How can I force myself to smile when I am filled with sorrow? It isn’t natural.” I told her she must be able to smile to her sorrow, because we are more than our sorrow. A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha. If we turn sorrow on then we are sorrow. If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We can not let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Smile

Never imitate

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Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation;

but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson