Stream Of Life

Alan Bouti

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day

runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth

in numberless blades of grass

and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth

and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

Rabindranath Tagore

Making Peace With Your Limits

Decenio
 

Even mountains 

have edges

There is an hour, usually past eleven, when a person stops moving and discovers a tiredness that sleep will not touch. Not the body — the body recovers. Something beneath it. You have spent the day proving you could carry more, and you could, and now you are sitting in the dark wondering why the victory tastes like nothing. You are not weak. You are simply finite, and no one ever taught you how to be that.

The Daily Meditation 

 

"Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear. The same things happen to another, and either because he does not see that they have happened or because he would show a great spirit, he is firm and remains unharmed."

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The Diagnosis

We were raised inside a quiet lie: that a limit is a temporary condition. 

A thing to be optimized, supplemented, disciplined away. 

Under that lie, every "I cannot" becomes a confession of laziness, and every boundary becomes evidence of a character defect not yet corrected.

So you never make peace. You negotiate. 

You promise yourself that next season you will need less sleep, feel less, want less, and finally become the version of you that has no edges at all.

Three symptoms you may be carrying right now:

1. A low static of guilt on the evenings you do nothing, as though rest were a debt you took out against tomorrow.

2. The private arithmetic you run at the end of each day — what you accomplished set against what a better person would have accomplished — a sum that never once has come out in your favor.

3. A grief you cannot name when you admit some doors have closed for good: the second career, the other city, the person you assumed you would become by now.

That last one is the true symptom of the soul. 

It is not exhaustion. It is mourning — mourning a self that was never possible, and being ashamed of the mourning.

 

The Unpacking

Read the meditation again and notice what it does not say. 

It does not promise that you can bear everything. 

It says you were formed by nature to bear what comes to you — formed, shaped, given a specific size. There is a boundary drawn around your life, and Marcus treats that boundary not as an insult but as a fact, the way a riverbank is a fact.

The Shadow is the belief that your limits are a verdict on your worth.

In the Shadow, every "no" is an admission of inadequacy. You keep the extra project, answer at midnight, attend the thing you dreaded, because each refusal feels like a small public confession that you are less than you were supposed to be. So you expand until you are thin. You mistake the width of your life for its depth.

The Light is the recognition that limits are what give a life its form.

Remove the banks and a river does not become free. It becomes a swamp — vast, shallow, going nowhere with great enthusiasm. The stone does not resent the sculptor's chisel for taking things away; the taking away is the statue. Your finitude is not the obstacle in front of the life. It is the outline of it.

And here is the harder turn. 

If your hours are limited, then every hour you spend is an act of love or an act of waste — there is no third category. A limitless life could afford indifference. Yours cannot. The edge is what makes the center matter.

You have been treating your smallness as a wound. 

It is a shape. And a shape is the only thing that can ever be beautiful.

The Parable

Picture a tent on the Danube, in the winter camp at Carnuntum. Outside, a frontier that will not stay quiet — the Marcomanni across the river, the campaigns dragging into their second decade. Inside the empire, a plague moving through the cities like weather, killing without regard for rank or virtue. The Emperor himself is unwell. His stomach troubles him, he sleeps badly, he takes his daily medicine and rises anyway.

This is the man writing the Meditations.

Count what he had lost. Most of his children, buried. His adopted brother, dead. His most trusted general in open revolt. And he was, by the accounts we have, a naturally studious and somewhat delicate man, formed by temperament for the library, handed instead a war he did not want and could not finish.

He did not win. That is the thing worth sitting with. He did not defeat the plague, did not pacify the frontier for good, did not raise the son who would preserve his work. He held a line, and then he died, and the line eventually gave way.

And in the tent, by lamplight, he wrote no plan for becoming greater. He wrote instructions for being good today — this hour, this duty, this temper kept in check. He had accepted the size of what one man is. Inside that acceptance he became, of all things, immovable.

The strength was not in the reach. 

It was in having stopped reaching for what was never his to hold.

The Modern Mirror

Now bring it to your desk.

Burnout is almost never caused by the amount of work. It is caused by the refusal to admit that work has a bottom. The hours are finite, the attention is finite, the reserve of care you have for other people is finite — and modern life has trained you to treat each of these as a personal failing rather than a physical fact.

So you stack. The role, the side project, the fitness protocol, the newsletter, the reading list, the parenting you promised yourself you would do better than your parents did. None of it is unworthy. That is precisely the trap: nothing on the pile is bad, so nothing on the pile can be removed.

And underneath sits the real belief, the one you would never say out loud: a truly capable person would not be struggling with this. So you do not reduce the load. You hide the strain. You become excellent at appearing untired.

The ancient answer is unglamorous and permanent. 

Choose your limits deliberately, or they will be chosen for you — by your body, in a way you will not get to negotiate. 

Decide what you are for. Then let the rest go, not as failure, but as the sculptor lets the stone fall.

You will not do everything. You were never going to. 

The only open question is whether the things you drop are chosen by you, or dropped from hands that finally shook.

in,  Stoic Wisdom 

Everything is Waiting for You

Magnific

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things

to come, the doors have always been there

to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone

is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the

conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

 

David Whyte

The Life He Never Chose

D-Keine

 How family expectations 

quietly become identity

A young man sat across from me and told me he no longer wanted to live.

As a psychiatrist, I hear those words more often than I wish I did. People arrive at them through depression, addiction, psychosis, grief, trauma, the collapse of a marriage, the loss of work, and many other forms of suffering. His story remained with me for a reason I did not understand immediately.

For years I have written about violence against women. I know what happens when a girl’s life is shaped by someone else’s power before she is old enough to understand what has been taken from her. Listening to him, I found myself thinking about a different kind of captivity. Nobody had beaten him or locked him in a room, yet very little of the life he described seemed to have been chosen by him.

The man in this essay is a composite of several patients whose stories began to echo one another so closely that the pattern became more important than the identifying details, which will remain private. He could have been in his late twenties, thirty-five, or forty-five. His age mattered less than the familiarity of what emerged once he began talking.

His family would probably have described a life in which almost everything was going well. 

He had an education, a respectable profession, a marriage, parents he remained close to, and the dependable reputation of a son who answered when they called. Somewhere along the way, he had learned that keeping other people comfortable belonged to his understanding of what made a good man. Nothing about his life would have immediately frightened anyone.

That was part of what frightened me.

The obvious explanations were all available. 

His marriage was failing. He was depressed. Work had become another source of pressure. His treatment might have needed to change. Had I known him only through a referral note, I might have begun there as well. Once we spoke, however, I could not stop thinking about the fact that everyone around him seemed intent on returning him to the life he had just told me he could no longer survive.

I found myself wondering when he had last made an important decision because it was genuinely his. Nothing in his chart answered that question, and I was not sure he could answer it either. For years he had moved through milestones that brought relief and approval to the people around him, until wanting something different had become almost impossible to imagine.

By the time he reached the hospital, every recent event seemed capable of explaining his despair. Each one was real, but none felt like the beginning. They seemed closer to the point at which a much older story could no longer hold together.

His wish to die was devastating, but I left the room carrying another question with me.

Had anyone ever been as curious about the life he wanted as they were about the life they wanted him to return to?

The Box

Very few boys grow up hearing, “You are not allowed to become yourself.” 

Families are usually far more loving than that, and far more complicated. 

Expectations arrive quietly, woven into ordinary life. 

A parent recommends a profession because it promises security. An uncle praises practicality. A grandmother worries that he is too sensitive for the world. He is reminded not to disappoint the family or throw away a perfectly good opportunity. None of those moments seems especially important on its own. Years later, however, they no longer sound like opinions. They sound like the only reasonable life.

That is what makes this kind of prison so difficult to recognize. 

It is usually built by people who genuinely love the child inside it. They want him to be safe. Fear simply teaches them to confuse safety with certainty. 

Slowly it begins speaking in the language of wisdom, responsibility, and common sense until curiosity almost disappears. Instead of wondering who this particular boy might become, the family begins hoping he will become someone they already know how to protect.

Children adapt long before adults realize they are adapting. 

They notice which emotions make a parent anxious, which opinions create tension, which dreams are welcomed, and which quietly disappear from conversation. 

Over time they become remarkably skilled at preserving the emotional balance of the family, often without recognizing that they are giving up parts of themselves in the process. Eventually those adaptations stop feeling like adaptations. They feel like personality.

By the time I meet these men, the family often has very little left to say because the conversation has already moved inside. Before a different path has the chance to unfold, another voice is already there warning them not to be selfish, not to make people worry, not to throw away something good after so many people sacrificed for them. After enough years, that voice no longer feels inherited. It sounds like conscience.

This is usually the point at which they arrive in my office, although depression, panic, burnout, or even a suicidal crisis are rarely the real beginning of the story. They are the consequences of years spent becoming exceptionally good at meeting expectations while gradually losing contact with themselves. When I ask what they actually want, the answer is often silence. Not because they are unwilling to tell me, but because they no longer know how to separate their own desires from the approval of the people they love.

I sometimes picture it as a boy growing up inside a box built by people who loved him. 

The box is large enough while he is small. It gives him direction, protection, and a place in the family. But children keep growing, while the box does not. Eventually he reaches the walls no matter which direction he turns. 

What once protected him begins to confine him. 

The tragedy is that, after living there for so long, he no longer realizes the walls belong to the box rather than to himself.

Every family leaves its imprint. 

The problem is not that the box exists. Children need structure before they can build lives of their own.

The problem begins when a man reaches adulthood still believing he must remain inside it. 

By then he may mistake inherited obedience for identity, never realizing that the voice he calls his own has been speaking in borrowed words for most of his life.

The Approved Life

The woman beside him was never the whole story, although both he and the people around him often believed she was. When love becomes humiliating or sexual betrayal enters a relationship, the mind naturally searches for the place where everything fell apart. By the time I meet men whose lives have unraveled after a marriage collapses or an affair is discovered, however, I am rarely looking at the beginning of the story. 

More often I am looking at the moment when years of accommodation finally become impossible to sustain. The marriage did not create the prison. It simply became the room where the walls could no longer be ignored.

As we continued talking, another pattern emerged. 

The marriage belonged to a version of adulthood assembled long before he had enough psychological freedom to ask whether it was truly his. Nothing about it looked obviously wrong. There was a respectable profession, a wife, a home, perhaps children, and the reassuring appearance of a stable future. Parents relaxed. Friends saw someone who had done everything correctly. 

That appearance became part of the problem because there was so little external evidence that anything was missing. It is difficult to explain despair when everyone around you keeps pointing to a life they would be grateful to have.

This may be one of the loneliest forms of suffering. 

When a life appears successful by every conventional measure, people instinctively search for the flaw in the person rather than in the life itself. He begins doing the same. If this marriage is good, why does it feel empty? If this is the woman he was supposed to want, why does he feel so profoundly unseen? Why does every achievement bring relief to everyone except him? 

The questions themselves begin to feel illegitimate because the life producing them has already been approved by everyone whose opinion once mattered.

When betrayal enters a marriage like this, the injury extends far beyond jealousy. 

The entire life the man spent years trying to inhabit begins to lose its stability. 

The relationship that was supposed to confirm he had finally arrived instead confronts him with another possibility: perhaps he had been performing a life that never truly belonged to him. 

Anger may become focused on his wife because she is the most immediate face of that realization, but underneath it I often hear something much older. 

There is grief for the years spent living according to someone else’s script, resentment toward the expectations that shaped those choices, and the painful recognition that obedience survived long after childhood had ended.

Visible failure is easier for other people to understand. 

Divorce, the loss of a career, financial collapse… those events give suffering a recognizable shape. A life that looks successful while quietly suffocating the person living it is far more difficult to recognize because there is nothing obvious to repair. The instinct of almost everyone nearby is to restore what existed before: reconcile, persevere, return to normal. 

Yet if normal was the place where a man gradually disappeared from his own life, returning him there is not healing. It is asking him to resume the performance.

Other men at the door

I asked him to return to the moment he picked up the gun and take me through it second by second. I wanted to understand what he believed had become impossible to continue.

At first, he spoke about his wife. 

Friends had told him she had slept with another man they both knew, and the humiliation had become inseparable from everything he had been taught to question about himself after betrayal. 

Was he masculine enough? Had another man replaced him? 

The affair injured his dignity as a husband, but as he spoke, it became clear that the marriage had exposed an older loss. He had spent years becoming the man others expected and had never considered what it might cost him to surrender authorship of his own life.

The people around him could understand the affair. They knew how a betrayed husband was supposed to suffer and what he was supposed to do next. What unsettled them was that he had begun questioning much more than his wife. His parents wanted him well enough to return to the life they recognized. His friends wanted the conversation brought back to manageable subjects. Even the men who cared about him seemed more comfortable offering solutions than asking what had made that life unbearable.

Another man’s collapse can be difficult to witness because it rarely remains contained within his own story. Once he begins questioning the marriage, work, duty, or endurance that organized his life, other men may find themselves standing too close to questions they have spent years avoiding. The response is often practical and immediate. Go back to work. Train harder. Focus on the children. Stop thinking about it. Stay busy until the feeling passes.

Most of this advice is offered in good faith. 

It also serves another purpose. It restores the familiar man before his unrest has a chance to disturb the arrangements around him. If his despair can be reduced to weakness, heartbreak, or temporary confusion, nobody else has to consider whether the same forms of obedience have shaped his own life.

This is one reason the box can survive long after the family has finished building it. 

Men reinforce it for one another by treating endurance as character and silence as evidence of strength. A man who speaks plainly about disappointment threatens that understanding. Calling him dramatic, selfish, or unstable protects the belief that those who remained quiet were healthier rather than better adapted to their confinement.

By the time he collapses, his refusal to continue may look like a departure from reality. 

Sometimes I hear the opposite. 

The life he had managed through accommodation has finally become visible to him, and the people gathered at the door are trying to persuade him not to leave.

The Threshold

His attempt followed another conversation in which decisions about his future were discussed as though they belonged to everyone except the person who would have to live with them. By then, the future had narrowed so completely that he could no longer imagine a legitimate way for the pressure to stop. Death had become less an ending than the only interruption still available to him.

What interested me most was the moment between intention and action. 

People often imagine a suicide attempt as one uninterrupted decision, but survivors sometimes describe something less orderly. I have sat with patients who jumped from heights, fired guns, or made other attempts that appeared unequivocal, only to describe a final movement they had not anticipated. 

The conscious mind had accepted death while the body still reacted against it.

I do not interpret that reaction as indecision or evidence that the suffering was less serious. 

It suggests that the wish to end pain and the wish to remain alive can coexist even at the most dangerous point. A person may have lost access to hope while some older, less deliberate part of the body continues to resist extinction.

This is why I am cautious about treating every suicide attempt as a simple wish for death. 

Sometimes the person has run out of acceptable ways to leave a life that has become psychologically unlivable. 

When marriage, family duty, work, identity, and every idea of being a good man belong to the same structure, abandoning that structure may feel morally indistinguishable from destroying everything connected to it.

By the time he reached the gun, he could imagine destroying himself more easily than dismantling the life that had confined him. 

Yet again and again I have listened to survivors describe 

a final movement in which the body seemed to recoil before the attempt became lethal. The conscious mind had accepted death. The body had not. That was the threshold I wanted to understand.

The part that still belongs to him

When I told him I believed there was still something healthy inside him, he looked genuinely confused. Like many people who have lived for years under relentless self-condemnation, he assumed I meant the version of himself everyone admired: responsible, agreeable, endlessly accommodating.

That was not the part I meant.

As he described what he called the “demonic” side of himself, I heard something very different. It did not sound like evil. It sounded like a mind governed by an internal authority incapable of mercy. Psychoanalysis calls this a persecutory superego. 

The name matters less than the experience. 

It is the part of the mind that no longer distinguishes between making a mistake and being one. It has little interest in repair or curiosity. Its language is accusation.

Patients often experience that voice as their own conscience. 

I rarely think it began there. More often it is built gradually from fear, shame, rigid expectations, and the belief that love depends on getting everything right. After enough years, its judgments no longer feel borrowed. They feel like truth.

The healthier part of the personality usually speaks much more quietly. 

It appears in moments the persecutory voice immediately tries to suppress: 

anger that exposes a violated boundary, grief for a life never lived, longing, confusion, even the wish to leave. 

Those experiences are not necessarily signs of illness. They may be the first evidence that a person is beginning to distinguish his own mind from the demands that have organized it for years.

That quieter self is the part I look for with my patients. 

Not the version that performs wellness or reassures everyone that everything will soon return to normal, but the one that still reacts honestly before adaptation has time to correct it.

I have gradually come to think of psychological health less as obedience than as authorship. 

It is the capacity to feel remorse without collapsing into self-hatred, to want something without first asking permission, and to separate from the people we love without experiencing that separation as betrayal.

Recovery cannot mean returning someone to the life that produced the collapse. 

It begins when a person can finally recognize which voice is his own and which has been speaking through him for so long that he no longer hears the difference.

The book I keep returning to

There is one book I have returned to more than any other. 

I first read The Alchemist in my early twenties, and I still find myself opening it after different seasons of my life. The words have not changed. I have. Every disappointment, difficult decision, loss, and unexpected joy has altered the person reading those pages, yet the book somehow continues to meet me there.

People often describe The Alchemist as a story about dreams or courage. 

I have never read it that way. 

To me, it is a book about remembering. 

Paulo Coelho calls it a Personal Legend, the unique life each of us is meant to live before fear, duty, and other people’s expectations persuade us to become someone more acceptable. 

Whether a reader understands that psychologically, philosophically, or spiritually matters less than recognizing the tragedy of becoming successful at living someone else’s story.

Perhaps that is why the book has stayed with me for so many years. 

The patients I remember most are rarely searching for symptom relief alone. Beneath the anxiety, depression, burnout, or suicidal despair, I often hear another question waiting to be asked.

When did I lose my own life?

That question rarely leaves the rest of a person’s life untouched. 

A marriage may change. A career may no longer fit. Even a family can begin reorganizing around a different version of the person they thought they knew. 

Therapy cannot promise that none of those things will happen.

That is why I continue returning to The Alchemist. 

Santiago repeatedly leaves places that promise certainty because he senses that staying would cost him something greater than failure. It would cost him himself.

Therapy is rarely about helping someone function more efficiently inside the box he has outgrown. More often it is helping him discover that the walls were never the limits of his life.

Jung called that process individuation. 

Coelho called it a Personal Legend. 

I am not especially attached to either term. 

I am attached to what they describe because I have watched people slowly come alive when they stop organizing their lives around fear and begin organizing them around something that feels unmistakably their own.

The consequences are rarely gentle. 

A marriage may no longer survive it. A career can begin to feel impossible to continue. Families sometimes struggle with the person who emerges because they had grown accustomed to the one who fit comfortably inside the box. Their reaction is understandable. 

When one person changes, everyone else is asked to reorganize as well.

Perhaps that is the greatest misunderstanding about freedom. 

We imagine it should preserve the life we already have. Often it cannot. A box that has become too small cannot simply be redecorated. At some point, the walls have to come down.

That is why I keep returning to The Alchemist. 

Not because it promises that becoming yourself will be easy, but because it reminds us there is also a cost to refusing. I have met too many people who believed they wanted to die when what they had really lost was permission to live as themselves.

The voice beneath the noise

There is one thing I have not admitted until now. I have been writing about my patients, but I have also been writing about myself.

This essay began in a room with a man whose life had become unbearable, yet as I listened to him, I realized I had been asking myself many of the same questions for years. Not because our lives were the same. They were not. But because I recognized something familiar in the slow way a person can disappear while continuing to look successful to everyone around them.

For many years, I never questioned the direction my life was taking because it made perfect sense to the people who loved me. I married when marriage was expected. Neurology seemed like the respectable path, the branch of medicine my family could understand and proudly describe to other people, while psychiatry occupied a far less comfortable place in their imagination. At the time, none of those choices felt imposed. They felt reasonable, responsible, almost inevitable. Years later, I could see where all those reasonable decisions had taken me.

I did not leave because I enjoy uncertainty. If anything, I have always loved routine. I become attached to places, to ordinary rituals, to the familiar rhythm of everyday life. Leaving has always cost me deeply. I left one country, then another. Eventually I left a profession that had once defined me, and later a marriage that no longer reflected the person I was becoming. None of those decisions felt triumphant. They felt like dismantling rooms I had spent years trying to build. Looking back, however, I no longer think I was destroying my life. I think I was destroying a box that had gradually become too small for the person growing inside it.

It has taken me years to recognize that pattern, and I still hesitate to describe it because I do not believe suffering is a punishment or that life rewards courage. Reality is more complicated than that. What I cannot ignore is that every period in which I moved further away from the work, the relationships, or the way of living that felt deeply true to me was eventually followed by another fracture. The form was never the same. At different moments it arrived as betrayal, institutional cruelty, moral injury, violence, or losses I could never have imagined beforehand. 

I do not believe life was trying to teach me a lesson. 

I believe living too far from ourselves eventually carries its own psychological cost.

For most of my life, I believed loyalty meant remaining faithful to the people, commitments, and responsibilities that had shaped me. I am, by nature, an extraordinarily loyal person. 

Walking away has never come easily, and every departure has felt like a loss long before it became a beginning. What took me much longer to understand was that loyalty becomes distorted when it is directed everywhere except toward the person who has to live the life. 

There are moments when remaining loyal to everyone else’s expectations quietly becomes a betrayal of ourselves.

Perhaps that is why The Alchemist has never really left me. 

I understood very little of it when I first read it. Each time I returned, I seemed to find a different book because I was no longer the same person reading it. 

What stayed with me was never the treasure at the end of the journey. 

It was Santiago’s willingness to keep walking after each life he thought would be enough. He keeps leaving certainty behind because, over time, he realizes that becoming the wrong person is a greater loss than beginning again.

The older I become, the less interested I am in helping people build lives that merely look successful. My work has become much quieter than that. 

I want to help people recognize the difference between the voice that grew out of fear and the one that has belonged to them all along.

When I think about the man whose story began this essay, I do not find myself wishing him an easier life. I find myself wishing him the freedom to discover which parts of his life were truly his and which had been inherited without ever being questioned. 

I think that is what I wish for every patient who has ever sat across from me. 

If I am honest, it is also what I continue to wish for myself.

Vera Hart

Benny Rivers - Step by Step In Time (Official Video Lyric)

 

                                  

I don't run like I did back then

Takes a breath just to start again

Morning light finds lines on my face

But I've learned to move at a kind of pace

I made didn't all come true

Some roads bent, some outgrew

Still, I found in the changing view

What stays with you is what you choose

We're just walking this road, step by step in time

Little sparks in a grand design

Every year brings a clearer sight

There's a quiet grace in another sunrise

No need to race what we can't control

Every mile shapes the heart and soul

I believe as the days unfold

There's a kind of strength in growing old

There was a time I chased every mile

Now I linger just to rest a while

Windows down with a slower song

Let the moment carry me alone

Used to think the best was gone too fast

Like joy was tied to a fading past

But the truth has a way of showing through

Some of the best comes later on for you

We're just walking this road, step by step in time

Little sparks in a grand design

Every year brings a softer view

Of the things that really matter to you

Through the turns and the highs and lows

There's a peace that the heart can know

And I see as the days unfold

There's a quiet gift in growing old

I won't forget where I've been before

Every lesson opened up a door

Time moves on, it won't slow down

But there's beauty waiting all around

We're just walking this road, step by step in time

Little sparks in a grand design

And the more that I live and learn

The more I see what's truly earned

No need to feel what I can't control

Every day shapes the heart and soul

Now I know as the days unfold

There's nothing wrong with growing old

Benny Rivers

Desiderata

Sara Kazemi

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann

You Already Know

stockcake

Some years ago, a friend who was one of the most beloved physician healers in Western Massachusetts died. He and his family were part of a wide circle of community and after he died they did a variety of moving spiritual rituals – they got a Tibetan Lama to come chant, they did 49 days of prayer practice, they did visualizations, they bathed his body, and shared many beautiful offerings.

After all this, his wife wanted to know what happened to him after his death. 

She went first to a wonderful Sufi master they had practiced with and asked, 

“Do you have any sense of what’s happened to him?” 

The master closed his eyes and said, 

“Yes, I’ve been tracking him. He’s now in Sufi heaven with the Saints. He was such a saintly soul.” 

Hearing this answer, she felt consoled.

Then she ran into the Tibetan Lama who had helped with her husband’s transition. She said, 

“I’ve been wondering how he’s doing.” 

The Tibetan Lama said, 

“Oh yes, don’t worry, I’ve been tracking him through the bardo. He’s now in a particular bardo, and he’s moving to another.” 

She nodded and thought, “Hmm, that’s a little different, but maybe so.”

The following week she visited a sagely Hindu guru with whom they had also practiced. Without being asked, the guru explained, 

“Oh, I’ve been meditating and connecting with your husband. He’s already in the womb of a woman in Washington, DC. He’s ready to take his next birth.” 

She listened confused by three teachers telling her three different things.

Not knowing who to believe, she came to ask me. 

I certainly was not going to give her another answer. Instead, I responded with a question, 

“Here’s a great Sufi master and a Hindu guru and a Tibetan Lama all telling you something different. Naturally, this brings confusion, you don’t know who to believe.” She smiled.

Then quietly I asked her,  

 

“Leaving aside what spiritual teachers have told you, what is it that you know yourself, truth that no one could tell you different because you know it so deeply? What are the things you actually know? You may not be able to know where your husband is, but what are the deepest knowings you have?”

She began to get still, and then answered, 

“One of the things I know that no one can tell me different is that everything changes. Everything that appears or arises eventually disappears. Everything that’s born dies. It’s all impermanence, it’s all in change.” 

I nodded, “Yes. What else do you know?”

She went on, 

“I’ve learned that the more I hold on to what changes, the more I struggle. And if I let it come and go as it does, life is easier.

I’ve also learned that I can’t stop pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss. They all keep coming no matter what I try to do. When I get lost in reaction, I suffer a lot. When I relax and come back to my practice of mindfulness and loving kindness, it all goes easier.

I also learned that in the end it’s love that matters and not anyone’s ideas about things. This has gotten even clearer with my husband‘s death.”

These words expressed her deep intuitive wisdom. 

I bowed and said that she already contained the core teachings that could guide her through birth and life, through changes and death.

Zen Master Soen Sa Nim would say: You already understand. You already know.

So I ask you who are reading: take a breath, let yourself get quiet. 

What do you know no matter what any of the lamas and mamas and swamis and gurus might say? 

What are the the deepest truths that you know about this human incarnation?

Now, through this lens of wisdom, take a moment to reflect. 

What is a compelling or difficult question for you in your life? 

What would the wisest and most compassionate part of yourself say in response? 

You can answer. You can know.

The beautiful thing about tuning into your deep understanding is that wisdom is both gracious and playful. As it says in the Tao Te Ching—

If you don’t remember the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. But when you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kind-hearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you. And even when death comes, you are at ease.

It is with the gracious ease of the Tao that you can begin to playfully navigate life from your own intuitive heart.

Jack Kornfield

In ways we cannot know

Julia Forsman

This heart-open project to bare our soles is first a spiral-spider movement inwards

To that mysterious ambiguous saucy source of constant change

When we tap that treacley tree-core

We can challenge some of what has gone before

Provided that we remember to use singing tones too

For we wish to spread the wonderfully dangerous belief

That there is a peachy potency for change in every soul

We wish to support this sap’s flow into our connecting communities

Just as it flows in birdsong and bubbling laughter

And leafing through the many forms this tree may shape

The many performances this being we are birthing may inspire

We will cook a patchwork platter

We will warm up a new rhythm, a new dance in syllable and sound and colour

Branching from our theory-trunk into a forest feast of story

Our roots and twigs will tingle with the knowledge that the waves of breakdown desperation

Hold future fulfilment in their foamy crashing

And if we intuitively trust the ripple-vibrations of our vibrant sharing

Our works will wash their way into the world

In ways we cannot know.

Simric Yarrow

Krishnamurti on Change

 If there is no fundamental change, 

the future is what we are doing 

in our lives in the present.

Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Himself

The future is what you are now. If there is no change – not superficial adaptations, superficial adjustments to any pattern, political, religious or social, but the change that is far deeper, demanding your attention, your care, your affection – if there is not a fundamental change, then the future is what we are doing every day of our life in the present. Change is rather a difficult word. Change to what? Change to another pattern? To another concept? To another political or religious system? Change from this to that? That is still within the realm, or within the field of ‘what is’. Change to that is projected by thought, formulated by thought, materialistically determined. So one must enquire carefully into change. Is there a change if there is a motive? Is there a change if there is a particular direction, a particular end, a conclusion that seems sane, rational? Or perhaps a better phrase is ‘the ending of what is’. The ending, not the movement of ‘what is’ to ‘what should be’.

All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have completely failed to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.

Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known

All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have completely failed to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society. As human beings living in this monstrously ugly world, let us ask ourselves, can this society, based on competition, brutality and fear, come to an end? Not as an intellectual conception, not as a hope, but as an actual fact, so that the mind is made fresh, new and innocent and can bring about a different world altogether? It can only happen, I think, if each one of us recognises the central fact that we, as individuals, as human beings, in whatever part of the world we happen to live or whatever culture we happen to belong to, are totally responsible for the whole state of the world. We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness, our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all of which divide us. And only when we realize, not intellectually but actually, as actually as we would recognise that we are hungry or in pain, that you and I are responsible for all this existing chaos, for all the misery throughout the entire world because we have contributed to it in our daily lives and are part of this monstrous society with its wars, divisions, its ugliness, brutality and greed – only then will we act.

If we are to bring about a true revolution in human relationship, which is the basis of all society, there must be a fundamental change in our own values and outlook.

Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life

To understand ourselves, we must be aware of our relationship, not only with people, but also with property, with ideas and with nature. If we are to bring about a true revolution in human relationship, which is the basis of all society, there must be a fundamental change in our own values and outlook; but we avoid the necessary and fundamental transformation of ourselves, and try to bring about political revolutions in the world, which always leads to bloodshed and disaster.

Energy is needed not only for external change, but also to bring about a deep, inward transformation or revolution.

Krishnamurti, The Awakening of Intelligence

Energy is needed not only for external change, but also to bring about a deep, inward transformation or revolution. One must have an extraordinary sense of energy which has no cause, which has no motive, which has the capacity to be utterly quiet, and this very quietness has its own explosive quality. One sees how human beings waste their energy, in quarrels, in jealousies, in a tremendous sense of anxiety, in the everlasting pursuit of pleasure and in the demand for it; it is fairly obvious that this is a wastage of energy. And is it not also a wastage of energy to have innumerable opinions and beliefs about everything? – how another should behave, what another should do and so on. Is it not a waste of energy to have formulas and concepts? In this culture we are encouraged to have concepts according to which we live. Don’t you have formulas and concepts in the sense of having images of how you should be, what should happen? – in the sense of thought which rejects ‘what is’ and formulates ‘what should be’? All such endeavour is a waste of energy.

I see that I must change completely from the roots of my being.

Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known

Let us state it clearly: I see that I must change completely from the roots of my being. I can no longer depend on any tradition because tradition has brought about this colossal laziness, acceptance and obedience; I cannot possibly look to another to help me to change, not to any teacher, any God, any belief, any system, any outside pressure or influence. What then takes place?

First of all, can you reject all authority? If you can it means that you are no longer afraid. Then what happens? When you reject something false which you have been carrying about with you for generations, when you throw off a burden of any kind, what takes place? You have more energy, haven’t you? You have more capacity, more drive, greater intensity and vitality. If you do not feel this, then you have not thrown off the burden, you have not discarded the dead weight of authority.

But when you have thrown it off and have this energy in which there is no fear at all – no fear of making a mistake, no fear of doing right or wrong – then is not that energy itself the mutation? We need a tremendous amount of energy and we dissipate it through fear but when there is this energy which comes from throwing off every form of fear, that energy itself produces the radical inward revolution. You do not have to do a thing about it.

Is there actually time in the psychological world – that is, to change that which is to something totally different?

Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Himself

Context: Is there actually time in the psychological world – that is, to change that which is to something totally different? Why do ideals, ideologies, whether political or religious, exist at all? Is it not one of the divisive concepts of man that has brought about conflict? After all, the ideologies, the left, right or centre, are put together by study, by the activity of thought, weighing, judging, and coming to a conclusion, and so shutting the door on all fuller enquiry. Ideologies have existed perhaps as long as man can remember. They are like belief or faith that separate man from man. And this separation comes about through time. The ‘me’, the I, the ego, the person, from the family to the group, to the tribe, to the nation. One wonders if the tribal divisions can ever be bridged over. Man has tried to unify nations, which are really glorified tribalism. You cannot unify nations. They will always remain separate. Evolution has separate groups. We maintain wars, religious and otherwise. And time will not change this. Knowledge, experience, definite conclusions, will never bring about that global comprehension, global relationship, a global mind. So the question is: is there a possibility of bringing about a change in ‘what is’, the actuality, totally disregarding the movement of time?

Time is a deceiver: it does not do a thing to help us 

bring about a change in ourselves.

Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known

When there is real danger, time disappears. There is immediate action. But we do not see the danger of many of our problems and therefore we invent time as a means of overcoming them. Time is a deceiver as it doesn’t do a thing to help us bring about a change in ourselves. Time is a movement which man has divided into past, present and future, and as long as he divides it he will always be in conflict. Is learning a matter of time? We have not learnt after all these thousands of years that there is a better way to live than by hating and killing each other. The problem of time is a very important one to understand if we are to resolve this life which we have helped to make as monstrous and meaningless as it is. The first thing to understand is that we can look at time only with that freshness and innocency of mind which we have already been into. We are confused about our many problems and lost in that confusion. Now if one is lost in a wood, what is the first thing one does? One stops, doesn’t one? One stops and looks round. But the more we are confused and lost in life the more we chase around, searching, asking, demanding, begging. So the first thing, if I may suggest it, is that you completely stop inwardly. And when you do stop inwardly, psychologically, your mind becomes very peaceful, very clear. Then you can really look at this question of time.

When there is a motive, there is actually no change at all.

Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Himself

Time is thought. Time is the past. Time is motive. Without any motive can there be – and we will use the word – change? Does not the very word ‘motive’ already imply a direction, a conclusion? And when there is a motive there is actually no change at all. Desire is again a rather complex thing, complex in its structure. Desire to bring about a change, or the will to change, becomes the motive and therefore that motive distorts that which has to be changed, that which has to end. The ending has no time.

I must change first; I must see the nature and structure of my relationship with the world – and in the very seeing is the doing. Therefore I, as a human being, bring about a different quality, and that quality is the quality of the religious mind.

Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known

I must change first. I must see the nature and structure of my relationship with the world – and in the very seeing is the doing. Therefore I, as a human being living in the world, bring about a different quality, and that quality is the quality of the religious mind. The religious mind is something entirely different from the mind that believes in religion. You cannot be religious and yet be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist. A religious mind does not seek at all, it cannot experiment with truth. Truth is not something dictated by your pleasure or pain, or by your conditioning as a Hindu or whatever religion you belong to. The religious mind is a state of mind in which there is no fear and therefore no belief whatsoever but only what is – what actually is. In the religious mind there is that state of silence that is not produced by thought but is the outcome of awareness, which is meditation when the meditator is entirely absent. In that silence there is a state of energy in which there is no conflict.

A very important and urgent question: 

can you bring about change in yourself? 

Don’t say, ‘If I change, will it have any value? 

Won’t it be just a drop in a vast lake and have no effect at all? 

What is the point of my changing?’ That is a wrong question.

Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Himself

This is really a very important and urgent question: whether man, you, can bring about change in yourself – not say, ‘If I change, will it have any value? Won’t it be just a drop in a vast lake and have no effect at all? What is the point of my changing?’ That is a wrong question, if one may point out. It is wrong because you are the rest of mankind. You are the world, you are not separate from the world. You are not an American, Russian, Hindu or Muslim. You are apart from these labels and words; you are the rest of mankind because your consciousness, your reactions, are similar to the others. You may speak a different language, have different customs, which is superficial culture – all cultures apparently are superficial – but your consciousness, your reactions, your faith, your beliefs, your ideologies, your fears, anxieties, loneliness, sorrow and pleasure, are similar to the rest of mankind. If you change it will affect the whole of mankind.

Change now completely, change with great passion, let the mind strip itself of everything, of every conditioning, all knowledge, of everything it thinks is ‘right’ – empty it.

Krishnamurti, The Impossible Question

There is belief in reincarnation, in being reborn in another life. When you inquire what it is that is going to be born in the next life, you come up against difficulties. What is it? Yourself? What are you? A lot of words, a lot of opinions, attachments to your possessions, to your furniture, to your conditioning. Is all that, including the soul, going to be reborn in the next life? Reincarnation implies that what you are today determines what you will be again in the next life. Therefore behave! Not tomorrow, but today, because what you do today you are going to pay for in the next life. People who believe in reincarnation do not bother about behaviour at all; it is just a matter of belief, which has no value. Incarnate today, afresh not in the next life! Change it now completely, change with great passion, let the mind strip itself of everything, of every conditioning, every knowledge, of everything it thinks is ‘right’ – empty it. Then you will know what dying means; and then you will know what love is. For love is not something of the past, of thought, of culture; it is not pleasure. A mind that has understood the whole movement of thought becomes extraordinarily quiet, absolutely silent. That silence is the beginning of the new.

Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is 

a fundamental change in ourselves.

Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life

What is the good of learning if in the process of living we are destroying ourselves? As we are having a series of devastating wars, one right after another, there is obviously something radically wrong with the way we bring up our children. I think most of us are aware of this, but we do not know how to deal with it. Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves. The individual is of first importance, not the system; and as long as the individual does not understand the total process of himself, no system, whether of the left or of the right, can bring order and peace to the world.

All over the world there are revolts and revolutions in order to change the social structure. Obviously the structure has to be changed; is it possible to change it without violence?

Krishnamurti, The Awakening of Intelligence

All over the world there are revolts and revolutions in order to change the social structure. Obviously the structure has to be changed; is it possible to change it without violence? – because violence begets violence. Through revolt one party can assume the power of government, and having achieved this, it will maintain itself in power through violence. It is fairly obvious that this is what is happening throughout the world. So we are asking whether there is a way of bringing about a change in the world and in ourselves which does not breed violence. I should have thought this would be a very serious problem for each one of us.

Institutions can never change humanity 

psychologically, deeply.

Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Himself

Institutions and organizations throughout the world have not helped man. There are all the physical organizations for one’s needs; the institutions of war, of democracy, the institutions of tyranny and the institutions of religion – they have had their day and they continue, and man looks up to them, longing to be helped, not only physically but inside the skin, inside the throbbing ache, the shadow of time and the far reaching thoughts. There have been institutions of many, many kinds from the most ancient of days, and they have not inwardly changed man. Institutions can never change man psychologically, deeply. And one wonders why man created them, for all the institutions in the world are put together by man, hoping that they might help him, that they might give him some kind of lasting security. And strangely they have not. We never seem to realize this fact. We are creating more and more institutions, more and more organizations – one organization opposing another.

Ideals and blueprints for a perfect utopia will not bring about the radical change of heart which is essential if there is to be an end to war and universal destruction.

Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life

There is no method by which to educate a child to be integrated and free. As long as we are concerned with principles, ideals and methods, we are not helping the individual to be free from his own self-centred activity with all its fears and conflicts. Ideals and blueprints for a perfect utopia will not bring about the radical change of heart which is essential if there is to be an end to war and universal destruction. Ideals cannot change our present values: they can be changed only by the right kind of education, which is to foster the understanding of what is. When we are working together for an ideal, for the future, we shape individuals according to our conception of that future; we are not concerned with human beings at all, but with our idea of what they should be. The ‘what should be’ becomes far more important to us than what is, namely, the individual with his complexities. If we begin to understand the individual directly instead of looking at him through the screen of what we think he should be, then we are concerned with what is. Then we no longer want to transform the individual into something else; our only concern is to help him to understand himself, and in this there is no personal motive or gain. If we are fully aware of what is, we shall understand it and so be free of it; but to be aware of what we are, we must stop struggling after something which we are not.

The Broken Men

Katarzyna Bialasiewicz

 

For things we never mention,

For Art misunderstood --

For excellent intention

That did not turn to good;

From ancient tales' renewing,

From clouds we would not clear --

Beyond the Law's pursuing

We fled, and settled here.

We took no tearful leaving,

We bade no long good-byes;

Men talked of crime and thieving,

Men wrote of fraud and lies.

To save our injured feelings

'T was time and time to go --

Behind was dock and Dartmoor,

Ahead lay Callao!

The widow and the orphan

That pray for ten per cent,

They clapped their trailers on us

To spy the road we went.

They watched the foreign sailings

(They scan the shipping still),

And that's your Christian people

Returning good for ill!

God bless the thoughtfull islands

Where never warrants come;

God bless the just Republics

That give a man a home,

That ask no foolish questions,

But set him on his feet;

And save his wife and daughters

From the workhouse and the street!

On church and square and market

The noonday silence falls;

You'll hear the drowsy mutter

Of the fountain in our halls.

Asleep amid the yuccas

The city takes her ease --

Till twilight brings the land-wind

To the clicking jalousies.

Day long the diamond weather,

The high, unaltered blue --

The smell of goats and incense

And the mule-bells tinkling through.

Day long the warder ocean

That keeps us from our kin,

And once a month our levee

When the English mail comes in.

You'll find us up and waiting

To treat you at the bar;

You'll find us less exclusive

Than the average English are.

We'll meet you with a carriage,

Too glad to show you round,

But -- we do not lunch on steamers,

For they are English ground.

We sail o' nights to England

And join our smiling Boards --

Our wives go in with Viscounts

And our daughters dance with Lords,

But behind our princely doings,

And behind each coup we make,

We feel there's Something Waiting,

And -- we meet It when we wake.

Ah God! One sniff of England --

To greet our flesh and blood --

To hear the traffic slurring

Once more through London mud!

Our towns of wasted honour --

Our streets of lost delight!

How stands the old Lord Warden?

Are Dover's cliffs still white?

Rudyard Kipling