But when it’s good, the experience of meditation is an unconditional way to be fine. You’re fine because you’re here. You’re fine because nowhere are you better than you are when you’re here. In this body, posted calmly on the border between yourself and the world, between the inside and the outside, and feeling yourself living. Not doing

Erica’s gift is to tell me that pure joy is as real as the shadow. Not more real, no, but just as real, and that’s already a lot. And for someone like me who believes that ultimate reality, the bottom line, is Raoul Dufy’s abominable little seascape, that’s good news.

I know Hervé, a peaceful, laconic, thoughtful guy who lives each moment as if it could be his last and who’s always careful not to clutter up his life. Like Diogenes, he thinks it’s better to drink from his hands than from a cup. When he travels, he tears out the pages of his books as he reads them to lighten his load. A journalist with the news

I say to myself that this guy demonstrates the same virtues of accuracy, simplicity, and naturalness in giving expression to his old master’s words that I look for when I write.

Frederica is a fictional character. I mean, a partly fictional character. She’s modeled on a real person with whom I gave a few lessons at the Pikpa, had a memorable booze-up, and listened to Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise, but most of the rest is invented. That’s what happens, inevitably, I think, as soon as you start changing proper names: fiction

When Charles de Foucauld woke up in the night, no matter what time it was, he made it a principle to get up and consider that the day had begun—a radical way of treating insomnia.

The great law of alternation S. N. Goenka warned us: the second day is generally difficult. It’s the same when you hike. On the second day you’re stiff, your feet are blistered, your thighs burn as you go down the steps of the hut, you wonder why you’re doing this, why, when nothing’s forcing you to inflict such punishment on yourself.

I view the last quarter of my life—because statistically, at almost sixty, that’s the phase I’m entering—in line with Glenn Gould’s maxim, which I’ve copied so often into so many successive notebooks: “The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder

The body has three hundred joints. The blood circulates through more than sixty thousand miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries. There are forty-six miles of nerves. Unfolded, the surface of the lungs would cover a soccer field. Little by little, yoga aims to become acquainted with all of this.