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Meanwhile, the person who knows what they value? Who has a strong sense of decency and principle and behaves accordingly? Who possesses easy moral self-command, who leans comfortably upon this goodness, day in and day out? This person has found stillness.
The child is in me still . . . and sometimes not so still.
It’s the seven-year-old living inside us. The one who was hurt by Mom and Dad, the sweet, innocent kid who wasn’t seen.
Think about the “age” of the emotional reactions you have when you are hurt or betrayed or unexpectedly challenged in some way.
Give more. Give what you didn’t get. Love more. Drop the old story.
The factory
worker wishes desperately to be a millionaire, the millionaire envies the simple life of the nine-to-five worker.
the man or woman with a beautiful partner thinks only of someone a little more beautiful.
the rival we’re so jealous of may in fact be jealous of us.
But if you had to trade places entirely with the person you envy, if you had to give up your brain, your principles, your proudest accomplishments to live in their life, would you do it?
What will happen to me if I get what I want? How will I feel after?
to consider the inevitable hangover before we take a drink.
Most people never learn that their accomplishments will ultimately fail to provide the relief and happiness we tell ourselves they will. Or they come to understand this only after so much time and money, so many relationships and moments of inner peace, were sacrificed on the altar
We get to the finish line only to think: This is it? Now what?
the mentality that gets an athlete to the top so often prevents them from enjoying the thing they worked so hard for. The need for of progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.
There is no stillness for the person who cannot appreciate things as they are,
East. “When you realize there is nothing lacking,” Lao Tzu says, “the whole world belongs to you.”
The greatest misfortune is to not know contentment. The word calamity is the desire to acquire. And so those who know the contentment of contentment are always content.
Epicurus: “Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”
“To have blessings and to prize them is to be in Heaven; to have them and not to prize them is to be in Hell. . . . To prize them and not to have them is to be in Hell.”
They are not made of anything strong or malleable enough to plug even the tiniest hole in a person’s soul. Nor do they extend the length of one’s life even one minute. On the contrary, they may shorten it!
who cannot see the wealth that was given to them at birth, that they have accumulated in their relationships and experiences.
If you believe there is ever some point where you will feel like you’ve “made it,” when you’ll finally be good, you are in for an unpleasant surprise. Or worse, a sort of Sisyphean torture where just as that feeling
appears to be within reach, the goal is moved just a little bit farther up the mountain and out of reach.
Enough comes from the inside.
From seeing what you already have, what you’ve always had. If a person can do that, they are richer than any billionaire, more powerful than any sovereign.
“We are here as if immersed in water head and shoulders underneath the great oceans,” said the Zen master Gensha, “and yet how pitiously we are extending our hands for water.”
We were not put on this planet to be worker bees, compelled to perform some function over and over again for the cause of the hive until we die.
“As long as this exists,” Anne thought to herself, “this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?”
Anne always managed to find in nature something to boost her spirits and center herself. “Beauty remains, even in misfortune,” she wrote. “If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance.”
what a source of peace and strength it can be. The trackless woods. A quiet child, lying on her belly, reading a book. The clouds cutting over the wing of an airplane, its exhausted passengers all asleep. A man reading in his seat. A woman sleeping. A stewardess resting her feet. The rosy fingertips of dawn coming up over the mountain. A song on repeat. That song’s beat, lining up exactly with the rhythm of events. The pleasure of getting an assignment in before a deadline, the temporary quiet of an empty inbox. This is stillness.
Here there was only sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I felt a part of it, empty myself; there was a moment in which I was nothing at all—almost nothing at all.
cultivate the poet’s eye—the ability to see beauty everywhere, even in the banal or the terrible.
Even of dying, he writes, “Pass
through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature. Come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.”
A city arranged the same way, the accumulation of hundreds of years of spasmodic, independent development.
Sitting quietly on a porch with a book and birdwatching.
The Japanese have a concept, shinrin yoku—forest bathing—which is a form of therapy that uses nature as a treatment for mental and spiritual issues.
To those reeling from trauma or a stressful profession as much as to those suffering from the ennui of modern life, Professor John Stilgoe has simple advice: Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people. . . . Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. . . . Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike and coast along a lot. Explore.
Don’t let the beauty of life escape you. See the world as the temple that it is. Let every experience be churchlike. Marvel at the fact that any of this exists—that you exist.
Let it calm you. Let it cleanse you.
you have to believe in something. You just have to. Or else everything is empty and cold.
“Try to look at this moment in the light of eternity,” she would tell him. Eternity. Something bigger than us. Something bigger than we can possibly comprehend. Something longer than our tiny humanness naturally considers.
The reformer Martin Luther was called before a tribunal demanding that he recant his beliefs, on threat of denunciation and possibly death.
He spoke. “I cannot and I will not retract, for it is unsafe for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other; so help me God. Amen.”
If you don’t make yourself dependent on anyone, if you don’t make yourself vulnerable, you can never lose them and you’ll never be hurt.
They take vows of chastity or solitude, or, conversely, try to reduce relationships to their most transactional or minimal form. Or because they have been hurt before, they put up walls.
“I want you to know that I absolutely love you,” he told her voicemail. “I want you to do good, have good times, same with my parents. I’ll see you when you get here.”
“my love for you is deathless.
The memories of all the blissful moments I have spent with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them so long.”
