I’m gonna be a cut-n-paste whore here, ‘cuz I found a new blog that I’m enamored of – meet Urban Monk. Some quotey goodness I’m sharing en tout:
“A note on taking it personally -
Though everyone supposedly knows they’re going to die, few people seem to believe it. Most of us seem to live as though life is eternal, and waste it on irrelevant concerns. Years go by so quickly – I can’t believe how fast nearly 37 years of my life have gone – and even those of us who make it into old age still don’t get very long. Yet we waste so much of our time, taking everything personally, being offended by what other people say or do, getting angry or uptight over trivial annoyances, gloating over shallow victories that amount to nothing, ignoring the present moment in favor of imagined futures that might never come, or places we might never get to.
Living in such a way ensures that, as Thoreau put it, you’ll eventually die with the realization that you never actually lived. I make no claim to any particularly profound insights, but there are some things I’ve gotten from time spent facing the wall in meditation…
Nothing is about you; people say what they say or do what they do for their own reasons, not because of you.
If you have good health, shelter, enough to eat and someone who loves you, then you have as much as you’re ever going to have, and imagined futures will bring you nothing that you can’t already find in the present moment.
Since every sentient being lives on death row, it’s stupid and wasteful not to appreciate every day and every moment.”
The Urban Monk also offers us a tidbit of quotey goodness he’s found from Blood Orchid, a remarkable book by his friend Charles Bowden:
“We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.”
Strangely perhaps, my reaction to reading this is a feeling of optimism. Are we insane if we recognize our insanity?
