Tag: Present moment

Know how to be happy

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I like this idea of over-borrowing, always demanding more from the present moment.

If you know how to be happy with the wonders of life that are already there for you to enjoy, you don’t need to stress your mind and your body by striving harder and harder, and you don’t need to stress this planet by purchasing more and more stuff. The Earth belongs to our children. We have already borrowed too much from it…..Much of our modern way of life is permeated by mindless over-borrowing. The more we borrow, the more we lose. That’s why it’s critical that we wake up and see we don’t need to do that anymore. What’s already available in the here and now is plenty for us to be nourished, to be happy.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Aligned with nature

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Pass through this brief life in accordance with nature…

Gladly…like an olive that ripens and falls…

grateful to the tree that it grew on.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations 4,48

Interesting

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In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.

John Cage, quoted in Mark Epstein, Going on Being

Untroubled

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The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit.

The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Becoming

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Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.

  Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.

This is a kind of death.

Anais Nin

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