Buddhism
Adding one extra feature nearly cost us our startup.
Monday morning, anxiety twisted in my chest as I deleted half of our codebase.
Our product was buried under features, each an attempt to stave off failure, yet leaving us on the brink of collapse. The team lingered, eyes glued to my screen.
“It’s too cluttered,” I finally said, swallowing my fear.
My
... See moreThe peace of mind on offer here is of a higher order: it lies in the recognition that being unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem. The human disease is often painful, but as the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure. A
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks
‘Each time the thought to give arises, act on it. Then notice what happens,’ Goldstein counsels, adding that ‘in my experience, generosity never leads to remorse.’ What happens, unsurprisingly, is that it feels great, so while initiating the practice can require a little willpower, it soon becomes self-reinforcing. Before you know it, you’re a pers
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
Buddhist scholar Geshe Shawopa, who gruffly commanded his students, “Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities.” Jesus says much the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount (though many of his later followers would interpret the Christian idea of eternal life as a reason to fixate on the future, not to ignore it). “
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks
N O W “Spiritual path” is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape: they stop for a sleep, or for several y
... See moreAnnie Dillard • For the Time Being
Do you suffer what a French paleontologist called “the distress that makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and stars”? For the world is as glorious as ever, and exalting, but for credibility’s sake let’s start with the bad news.
An infant is a pucker of the earth’s thin skin; so are we. We arise like budding yeas
Annie Dillard • For the Time Being
7.5mm 108 White Bodhi Tree Wood Bracelet
kyoto-asahiya.com
Informal but pretty and would be nice
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 grasp
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks
“The best approach is that of the middle way. Learn as much as you can. Study, practice, and prepare. Then drop everything and let this natural process occur naturally. Throw away the map and fearlessly enter the territory. It’s like preparing for a big trip. We want to pack properly, review our checklists, and ensure we have enough money and gas.
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