Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.
- You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.—Rumi
- I ain’t a-saying you treated me unkind / You could’ve done better but I don’t mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time / But don’t think twice, it’s all right.—Bob Dylan
- Will this decision take me in the direction of greater aliveness?
- Aliveness isn’t about feeling better; it’s about feeling better.
- The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.—Wendell Berry
- Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience.—bell hooks
- Isolation, loneliness, and disconnection are the natural consequence of a culture of fear.
- Develop your tolerance for uncertainty.
- Learn to be silent.
Practice to become the person you want to be, daily. - What can be destroyed by the truth should be.
- You cannot calm the storm, but you can calm yourself. The storm will pass.
- The only people that can betray us are the people we trust.
- Nature trades in fine balances.
- Rare is the one who gets the gift but not the curse.
- Never negotiate piecemeal.
- Time pressure makes for bad decisions.
- If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.
- If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.—Timothy Snyder
- Specialization increases productivity.
- Love and death will find you. Everything else you have to find for yourself.
- Believe in your ability to learn and that learning is easy.
- …the endless din of people talking, talking, talking.
- The bigger the group, the greater the percentage that are dissatisfied.
- λάθε βιώσας, live under the radar—Epicurus
- Our narratives say more about our need for coherence than Reality.
- Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge (or feel).—Carl Jung
- Comfort dulls the mind, saps courage.
- Move the horizon closer.
- It’s a great privilege to know any one true thing about someone, such as their favorite food, their favorite song, etc.
- Good is subjective but to be the best requires some kind of ranking system.
- Complacency kills. Evolve with your surroundings.
- Keep a good heart but be selective about who has access to it.
- Start noticing other people’s “glimmers”: the little moments, words, places, situations that cause them to light up.
- Politics is concerned with persuasion. Best to not need to persuade other people.
- Some people need crowds to forget that they are nothing alone.
- Ear over grammar.
- Everybody wants the view, but few want to make the hike.
- Cruelty requires justification.
- Before you worry about effort, worry about direction.
- Keep secrets, keep your integrity.
- Proof of a way of life is in the quality of life of those that follow it.
- There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it.—Richard Feynman
- Possibility over punishment.
- If hard work led to success, the donkey would own the farm.
- I need no leader and no god. I am my own leader and my own god. I make my own bibles. I believe in myself—that is my whole credo.—Henry Miller
- Real love makes you softer with yourself others. If it’s making you more irritable, more cold, more bitter, it’s not love.
- Find the strength to do both.
- Listen; give tea.
- Not all wounds heal.
Improvement is contingent on recognizing failure and commiting to improvement. - To each its art, to art its freedom.—motto of International Symbolism
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