Tag: wellbeing

We like to find someone, something to blame

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When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look into the reasons it is not doing well.  It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like lettuce.

Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.

Thich Nhat Hahn

To thine own self be true

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To be yourself 

in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else

is the greatest accomplishment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Noticing what is here, not what we would like to be here

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Similar thoughts to yesterday morning’s post – this time from the Zen tradition – on staying close to what is actually happening, moment by moment, rather than worrying about what may happen. Sometimes it may not be what we would want, so our practice is to see if we can open to it and acknowledge it’s happening, even if we do not like it.  It also encourages us to meet every person today with fresh eyes, rather than immediately reducing them to  history which we have had with them, or to what we have come to “expect” from them.

The aim of Zen is to focus our attention on reality itself, instead of our intellectual and emotional reactions to reality – reality being the ever-changing, ever-growing, indefinable something known as “life,” which will never stop for a moment for us to fit it satisfactorily into any rigid system of pigeonholes and ideas.

Alan Watts

To love the reality of what happens today

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Over and over again I see – in myself and in others – the capacity to turn things that do not actually exist – possible events in the future – into real,  vivid,  scenarios and tangible fears in the present. A huge amount of our anxiety comes from what is not, what “may happen”.  The big challenge is to stay with what actually is, not what the mind convinces us could possibly be. Here,  two quotations,  from completely different traditions,  encourage us in this regard today.

Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise.  Hearing what is not can drive you mad.

Ghalib, Sufi Poet and mystic, 1797 – 1869

The big thing for me is to love reality and not live in the imagination, not live in what could have been or what should have been or what can be, and somewhere, to love reality and then discover that God is present.

Jean Vanier, Founder of the L’Arche Communities

Sunday Quote: Identity

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Your identity is not equivalent to your biography

John O Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty

Being patient and starting over

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I was thinking about the GPS in my car. It never gets annoyed at me. If I make a mistake, it says, “Recalculating.” And then it tells me to make the soonest left turn and go back. I thought to myself, you know, I should write a book and call it “Recalculating” because I think that that’s what we’re doing all the time. If something happens, it challenges us and the challenge is, OK, so do you want to get mad now? You could get mad, you could go home, you could make some phone calls, you could tell a few people you can’t believe what this person said or that person said. Indignation is tremendously seductive, you know, and to share with other people on the telephone and all that. So to not do it and to say, wait a minute, apropos of you said before, wise effort to say to yourself, wait a minute, this is not the right road. Literally, this is not the right road. There’s a fork in the road here. I could become indignant, I could flame up this flame of negativity or I could say, “Recalculating.” I’ll just go back here. And no matter how many times I don’t make that turn, it will continue to say, “Recalculating.” The tone of voice will stay the same.

Sylvia Boorstein.