knew that this was quite certainly the end. You accepted it, and quite suddenly the whole universe made sense. All problems, all questions vanished, and you understood that there was no ‘you’ other than the eternal. But the bomb was a dud, and you lived to remember the experience. . . . You were in a concentration camp, and you had been there so

life is quick, and it’s temporary. What you have now you could lose tomorrow, and gripping it so tightly, binding it up with resistance doesn’t mean it’s safer. It means that when the day comes that it passes—as does everything, as does everyone—you will realize you never really enjoyed it. And healing? It’s about getting to a place where you

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in

“accepting what I cannot control.

I came to Daoist philosophy through Ursula Le Guin’s rendition of the Daodejing . In the second poem of that small volume, I read:

The things of this world

exist, they are;

you can’t refuse them.

-like a moment of vertigo. I still can’t explain why this truism has the effect on me it does, but I find myself, in moments of pain or grief, reminding