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learning to view passing thoughts and feelings as if one were a spectator, not a participant.
‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’9 the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.’
To love at all is to be vulnerable7. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this centre and soul of our being, which we call ‘I’. For this we know to be the real man – the thinker of our thoughts; the feeler of our feelings, the knower of our knowledge.
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when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.
‘kakorrhaphiophobia’,
BORIS: Nothingness. Non-existence. Black emptiness. SONJA: What did you say? BORIS: Oh, I was just planning my future.
‘Proficiency and the results of proficiency’5, wrote Aldous Huxley, ‘come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold.’
There’s never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life. We’re never allowed to know when this fantastic voyage might end … but that’s part of the life-disorienting chaos that makes this choice so thrillingly difficult.’
