This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties… because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well- adjusted: You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.

The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.