Sublime

Enlightened mind consists of prajna, or “discriminating awareness,” and karuna, or friendship and kindness.

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up.

Now, if you were Yantou’s friend, he didn’t share your emotions and the disappointments of love and work. You couldn’t talk through a crisis with him in order to continue your life on more or less the previous, precrisis trajectory. Yantou wasn’t useful for that. He didn’t care about restoring normalcy. What he did help with was a change of heart.

There is an underlying joy and peace that can be known and that doesn’t end. When you can practice being yourself and going beyond a limiting story, you create the conditions for transformation and begin walking a path of freedom.