“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess, a person happy doing their own work is usually considered eccentric, if not subversive. Cultivate resources within yourself that bring you happiness outside of what others define as success and failure. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”
– Bill Watterson (creator of the comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes)
“We do not hear nature boasting about being nature, nor water holding a conference on the technique of flowing. So much rhetoric would be wasted on those who have no use for it. The man of Tao lives in the Tao, like a fish in water. If we tried to teach a fish that water is physically compounded of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, the fish would laugh its head off.”
“When a grasshopper sits on a blade of grass, it has no thought of separation, resistance, or blame. Children seem to prefer dragonflies whose wings and bellies are as red as chili peppers. But the green grasshopper blends completely with the green grass, and children rarely notice it. It neither retreats nor beckons. It knows nothing of philosophy or ideals. It is simply grateful for its ordinary life. Dash across the meadow, my dear friend.”
“Just imagine becoming the way you used to be… before you understood the meaning of any word, before opinions took over your mind. The real you is loving, joyful, and free. The real you is just like a flower, just like the wind, just like the ocean, just like the sun.”
The thing about walking in sand is that you simply cannot rush. Each step takes time. Each step requires attention. You can choose a destination 10, 20, or even 100 feet away, but each step will only take you incrementally closer – slowly, deliberately – and you must make each stride mindfully and with care, so as to keep your balance and to keep yourself moving in the right direction. It is an exercise in patience. It is an exercise in presence. It is an exercise in Zen.
Sometimes you may think, “I will double my effort, triple it, maybe even multiply it five-fold.” But every such increase, even the most emphatic, tends to add at most maybe 5 or 10 percent to your speed – certainly not enough to be worth the additional expenditure of energy, not to mention the attendant elevation of stress, both physical and mental. Therefore, in the end, you eventually discover that your best strategy is merely to take it slow, to expend a reasonable amount of effort with each new step, and to move forward with calm, intention, and purpose – at the pace the sand will allow.
One of the delightful benefits, of course, of walking in sand in such a mindful manner is that sometimes you see things that you might have missed otherwise. Like a rock… shaped like a heart.
“One kind of happiness is to survive a storm at sea, and to reach the shore in safety. Another is to triumph over hardship. Another is moving up in wealth and strength and position. Or one can hope; there are so many hopes. Some human hopes succeed and others fail. But a truly happy life is happiness day by day.”
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
— I Corinthians 13:4-7
Whether one is religious or not, in my opinion this stands as one of the most profound and beautiful descriptions of love ever written. It is truly something worthy of our aspiration.
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