Reminders for myself

You can't drive forward if you keep looking in the rearview mirror.

The way you change a person is by getting through not to their head or their will but to their heart.

What causes anger, stress is that things don’t go the way we expect them to. This time, expect that things will go wrong. And accept it. Expect your partner to be less than perfect, expect your friends to let you down, expect plans to go awry, expect people to be rude, expect colleagues to not do their share, expect the glass to break. And accept i... See more

The parable of the second arrow is a well-known Buddhist story about dealing with suffering more skilfully. It is said the Buddha once asked a student,

‘If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful? If the person is struck by a second arrow, is it even more painful?’

He then went on to explain,

‘In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. Ho... See more

you need to start before you’re ready because you become ready by starting. you figure out what works by seeing what doesn’t work. there is very little that you can *think* yourself into a reality-approved answer to. you need to live out your questions by experimenting with them.

In my mind, pity isn’t even analogous to compassion. Pity is just the paternalistic cousin of contempt. It allows us to see others as “those less fortunate than ourselves” (a term I loathe). Pity keeps the other person at a distance and me in a rarified state of satisfaction.... Compassion, on the other hand, draws us close.