Courage
"Not Knowing Is Most Intimate"
Practitioners of Zen Buddhism wrestle with a teaching story of a master questioning a pilgrim: Dizang, the teacher, asks the pilgrim Fayan, "Where are you going?" Fayan says, "Around on pilgrimage." Dizang then asks, "What is the purpose of pilgrimage?" Fayan replies, "I don't know." Dizang responds, "Not knowing is most intimate.”
ReadCheckmate
“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” I was sitting on a beach a few years ago looking out on the ocean. There was nothing especially notable about that particular day, not one of those brilliantly clear vistas, in fact it was a warm morning with the sun making the horizon hazy and indistinct. There were a few birds flying past, a faint call off from the distance. In short, there was nothing of any postcard significance, just a warm morning along the Pacific coast.
ReadLiving Confidently
When I think of confident people, they are invariably cool, unflappable, even insouciant, but they carry themselves with an authority that those of us around them find compelling. Picture Martin Luther King Jr. as he led a walk with five thousand demonstrators; or fourteen year old Greta Thurnberg, addressing a conference of UN aristocrats, many of whom older than her grandparents, saying "How dare you!" to their pathetic response to climate change. Ms. Thurnberg and Dr. King leave no doubt about what it is that matters to them. What had been instilled within both became the defining nature of their engagement with the world. Each of us can live authentically too, when there is no distance between what resides within and our persona in the world. Besides being the author of the one and only life we have, we get to live out what matters most to us.
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