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My travels took me to the remote woodlands of Massachusetts, where I spent a week on a silent meditation retreat;
‘Excuse me, I just got out of the lunatic asylum – can you tell me what year it is?’
take rides on the New York City subway, calling out loud the names of the stations.
This.
‘The glands inside my brain discharging the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) … healing all my sickness … erasing all…’
which involved moving at a glacial pace across the meditation hall, trying to divide the sensations of each footstep into the component parts of ‘lifting’, ‘moving’ and ‘placing’, and which I had initially concluded was a waste of time.
By the time the retreat drew to a close, I found to my surprise that I didn’t want it to end; I could easily have stayed another week.
Moreover, I felt as if I were among friends. Even though I had never exchanged words with most of the other retreatants – and wouldn’t have recognised them in the street, given that we’d been keeping our eyes downcast – a tangible sense of community had arisen in the meditation hall. When the gong rang to indicate that we could speak again, small talk felt scratchy and awkward; it seemed to interfere with the companionship.
Yessssss
When you rate your self highly, you actually create the possibility of rating your self poorly; you are reinforcing the notion that your self is something that can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the first place.
Schneier coined the term ‘security theatre’ to refer to all those measures that are designed primarily to increase the feeling of security, without actually making people more secure.
AN UNREMARKABLE BUSINESS park near the airport outside the city of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, stands a poignant memorial to humanity’s shattered dreams. Not that you’d know it from the outside. From the outside, it looks like a car dealership, because that’s what it was until 2001, when a company with the enigmatic name of GfK Custom Research North America moved in.
We celebrate Captain Scott’s failed and fatal effort to be first to the South Pole; we cherish the spirit of the Dunkirk evacuation more than the triumph of victory.
leaf and commissioning jeweled Fabergé eggs by the dozen. England had her empire; Spain, her Armada; France, her Napoleon; Germany, its unspeakable zenith. Even Belgium had a moment of glory – though, true, things haven’t been quite the same since the death of Charles the Bold in 1477.
(There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.)
‘Downfall’, writes the American Zen Buddhist Natalie Goldberg,
‘brings us to the ground, facing the nitty-gritty, things as they are with no glitter. Success cannot last forever. Everyone’s time runs out.’ She goes on: ‘Achievement solidifies us. Believing we are invincible, we want more and more.’ To see and feel things as they really are, ‘we have to crash. Only then can we drop through to a more authentic self.
Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing...
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next time you flunk an exam or mishandle a social situation, consider that it is happening only because you’re pushing at the limits of your present abilities – and therefore, over the long run, improving them.
Woody Allen’s 1975 movie Love and Death rests: BORIS: Nothingness. Non-existence. Black emptiness. SONJA: What did you say? BORIS: Oh, I was just planning my future.
Becker’s view, all religions, all political movements and national identities, all business ventures, all charitable activity and all artistic pursuits are nothing but ‘immortality projects’, desperate efforts to break free of death’s gravitational pull.
briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you.’
‘jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.’
‘Death is nothing to us,’ he says, ‘since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’
Chris Harris
‘I suppose the strongest feelings came,’ she told him, ‘from realising that it would be me who will die – not some other entity, like Old-Lady-Me, or Terminally-Ill-and-Ready-to-Die me.
you’ll have to pick an older age – and then complete the sentences ‘I wish I’d spent more time on…’ and ‘I wish I’d spent less time on…’. This turns out to be a surprisingly
to figure out what, specifically, you might do in order to focus on life’s flavours, so as to improve your chances of reaching death having lived life as fully and as deeply as possible.
way of resisting the ‘irritable reaching’ after better circumstances or better thoughts and feelings.
